IRAQ: Prosperous Kurdish exiles who returned to Iraq are playing a leading role in rebuilding the region, Nicholas Birch reports from Sulaimaniyah.
Get into a taxi in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah, and the chances are the driver won't budge until you've fastened your seat belt. Nothing to do with safety, they say: it's the new law.
"The new transport minister spent 20 years in Sweden," shrugs one, weaving nonchalantly through unruly traffic on Sulaimaniyah's central boulevard.
"Now he's trying to turn Kurdistan into a new version of it."
The new minister is not the only newcomer with big ideas. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled oppression under Iraq's former Baathist regime, most to Iran, but thousands of others to Sweden, Germany and Holland. Encouraged by the Kurdish authorities, they have been trickling back since 1991, when the north broke off from the rest of the country.
Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, the trickle has turned into a flood.
"When Kurdish friends back in Berlin ask how things are going, I tell them things are great," boasts Bakhtiar Omar, who worked in a German factory for 15 years.
His delicatessen, which opened early last year, was an immediate hit among those who could afford it.
"There's a market here for good whisky and German biscuits," he jokes.
Often relatively well-educated and wealthy, diaspora Kurds like Mr Omar are in high demand in the upper echelons of Sulaimaniyah's government and booming business sector.
Most ministers here have spent at least a couple of years in western exile.
But it is not just the possibility of greater wealth or power that brings them back.
"In Germany, I could earn more in three days than I earn here in a month," says Salar Bassireh, who returned six months ago to teach politics at Sulaimaniyah university. "The difference is that Germany can survive very well without one more academic. My people cannot."
It's a sense of patriotism shared by Awaz Mohamed, who last June resettled in Iraqi Kurdistan with her two children and husband, an official in one of the two largest Kurdish parties. "For every one of the 20 years we spent in Sweden", she says, "spiritually we were here."
But the reality of return, for Ms Mohamed at least, turned out to be more difficult than the ideal. A women's rights activist in Sweden, she immediately joined one of the many women's organisations that have sprung up in Sulaimaniyah over the past decade. "I knew Kurdish society was a man's world", she said.
"What has shocked me the most is just how deeply ingrained such attitudes are among the women I work with. I feel a bond with the younger generation, but the women of my age are on a different planet."
Holding tight to her optimism, Ms Mohamed insists that returnees like herself can be a force for positive change in Iraqi Kurdistan. A brief visit to Gasha, the school where her children study, suggests mutual comprehension could take some time.
During the lunch break, classroom four has been transformed into a disco. A sound system blasts out music straight from America's grooviest recording studios. Boys and girls moonwalk their way past the white board. Others imitate the jabbing, stabbing movements of their favourite rap group. An elderly cleaning lady, meanwhile, silently clears dust from the floor with a handle-less broom.
The dancers are all children of the Kurdish diaspora: Gasha was set up specially by a local NGO to cater to their needs. While most Iraqis would agree Sulaimaniyah is the second most liberal city in Iraq after central Baghdad, for them it's a provincial dump.
"I understand why my parents wanted to come back - here they are important people - but couldn't they have left me at home", complains Shania Shoresh, a 16-year old who's spent the past nine years in London.
"There's nothing for teenagers to do here, especially since a girl gets called a whore if she goes out after dark."
Her new Swedish friend, Arez Awat, agrees.
"The boys here are retarded", she says. "When they see you, you can see them going 'wow', like they want to eat you. And they think they have a right to grope you."
No proponent of the traditional argument that good girls should ignore such behaviour, she adds that she's slapped a fair few men since arriving six months ago.
If the girls are horrified by Sulaimaniyah, Sulaimaniyah's teachers are no less horrified by them.
After all, they balk at the rote-learning that is still a central part of Iraqi education. They don't see why they should stand up when the teacher asks them a question. And they swear.
"We pick teachers for their open-mindedness," says Gasha director, Munira Omar Hassan. "Even so, three have resigned since we opened in October [ 2004]."
Despite terrorising their elders, most students describe the school as the only place they can behave normally in Sulaimaniyah. Will it be enough to persuade them to stay? Shania Shoresh doesn't think so.
"Gasha or no Gasha, I'm going straight back to London as soon as I'm 18," she says.