Not cashing in anymore

Yousif Jassim Mohammed would know. The Iraqi merchant’s gift shop sits on prime real estate opposite a gold-domed shrine in Najaf, a huge draw for the busloads of Iranian pilgrims that form the bedrock of Iraq’s tourist trade.

Not long ago, the 60-year-old father of three could count on selling $1,000 worth of silver jewellery, prayer beads and trinkets a day.

Now, far fewer Iranians are passing by, and those who do come are holding tight to their cash. Mohammed says he’s lucky to make a tenth of what he used to.

“Unlike before, they’re now bargaining down to their last breath,” Mohammed said of his remaining Iranian customers.

“The sanctions have hit their economy very badly, and that is being reflected back on us.”

The Iranian rial has plummeted in value against the dollar over the past year, with the slide accelerating over the past month. The drop is blamed on Western-led sanctions targeting Iran’s suspect nuclear programme but also on government mismanagement by Tehran.

The steep decline is painful for ordinary Iranians, who now have to pay far more for imported goods. But it is also damaging Iraq’s fragile tourism industry, pinching small-time entrepreneurs and forcing businesses to lay off workers.

Fewer Iranians are able to afford visits to holy sites here and elsewhere in Iraq because each dollar or Iraqi dinar now costs roughly three times what it did as recently as last year. That has pushed the price of organised tours up sharply and made Iraqi merchants far less willing to accept rials as payment.

“It’s more expensive now because of the [currency] problems we are facing,” said Nakhi Morteza, 56, a pilgrim from Tehran who was helping lead a tour group outside Baghdad’s Kazimiyah shrine this week.

Even some Iraqi money changers are refusing to accept Iranian banknotes, saying they have little use for a currency that is so volatile.

Tehran’s state-run pilgrimage company owes Iraqis about $75 million in unpaid bills that have piled up since last year, according to Mahmoud Abdul-Jabbar Al Zubaidi, the head of the tourist department at Iraq’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

That has prompted some of Iraq’s biggest travel agencies and several hotels to stop accepting Iranian pilgrims altogether until the payment dispute gets resolved.

Iman Rasool Nima, who runs the Janat Al Firdous hotel outside the Kazimiyah shrine, said she stopped taking in Iranian pilgrims two months ago after tour groups racked up $50,000 in unpaid bills.

She is now focusing on attracting pilgrims from Arab countries such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia instead. Iranian pilgrims account for about 95 per cent of Iraq’s tourist trade.

“The Iranians make up the bulk of our business... So of course our business is down,” she said.

The head of one large Iraqi travel agency in Najaf said he is owed $5 million by the Iranians and won’t be accepting any more pilgrims from the country for now.

The businessman, who declined to be named because he is still in negotiations about the unpaid bills, expects to lay off 35 of his 75 employees by the end of this month because of the lost Iranian customers.

Like others in the industry, he is insisting on being paid in dollars rather than rials.

“It is like committing suicide for any merchant in Iraq to deal in a fluctuating currency like rials today,” he said.

Officials at Iran’s Hajj and Pilgrimage Organisation, which arranges trips to religious sites abroad, refused to comment.