When someone gives you lemons, you make lemonade, right?
And so it goes in Freedom Land of Iraq, where for many, now out from under the heels of Islamic State, the Iraqi people have only to clear out all the bombs, IEDs, and unexploded ordnance left everywhere they want to live by all sides in this ongoing clusterf*ck of foreign policy adventurism.
Despite the gazillions of dollars in U.S. aid, Iraq claims not to have the personnel to defuse all the explosives left behind once freedom reigns in places like Fallujah. So, concerned local citizens, who have been making defusing bombs for decades (handling explosives is an Olympic event in Iraq), smelled a business opportunity.
The fellows at NIQASH tell us the story of one Faleh al-Marsoumi, who got involved in the lucrative new trade because it was taking too long for authorities to come to his home and remove booby trapped explosives. He tried unsuccessfully to find someone to help him on the freelance market (there is no TaskRabbit franchise – yet – in Iraq.)
Unable to find anyone at a reasonable price, Marsoumi decided to do the work himself.
“I watched some videos on the Internet about how to remove IEDs,” he says. See the video, below, at around :55. That’s the wrong way to do it.
After clearing his own property, Marsoumi soon was helping out friends at their houses. Eventually he began charging for his services. He made so much money that he quit his day job and now focuses exclusively on IED disposal. He has even hired on two guys to assist him.
“There are three of us now working together and we charge some of the lowest prices in the market,” Marsoumi said.
Clearing a house costs between US$300 and US$700. Clearing a car of IEDs costs US$200.
Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. His latest book is Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent. Reprinted from the his blog with permission.