Kurdistan is one of the wealthiest land in the world.

(Title and below from the Kurdish Globe - Sept 24, 2009)

The Kurds make up around 95% of Kurdistan with the remaining 5% including the minority groups.

Largest finds of oil this year was made by a small producer, Heritage Oil, at the Miran West One field in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. It found nearly two billion barrels of oil and plans to drill a second well before the end of the year.

While the central government of Iraq has had a hard time attracting investors to develop its huge fields, local authorities in Kurdistan have been successfully wooing foreign producers.

The Kurdistan region of Iraq is a geological extension of the world's richest petroleum fairway, which extends from Saudi Arabia to Kurdistan. It is estimated to have around 45- 100 billion barrels of oil reserves making it one of largest in the world.

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"unjustifiable and incalculable harm"

Please note that the above is only the beginning of an article that was printed only a day after the Kurdish Globe covered the DNO scandal (at which DNO was accused of inflicting "unjustifiable and incalculable harm" on the reputation of the KRG). What about Heritage Oil? They had a merger planned with Genel Enerji (Turkey) in which they would control Kurdish oil reserves and become one of the FTSE's top 100 UK companies. Genel Enerji, which formerly worked together with DNO on the Taq Taq oil site will also be subject to the probe related to the DNO scandal. Likely both Heritage Oil and Genel Enerji will profit from this, but at what cost?

My guess is that the above article is basically a plea to foreign investors to keep investing in Kurdistan... If you read the entire article, the second half degenerates into facts and figures on the ethnic composition of Kurdistan and is completely unrelated to the grammatically incorrect title. In what sense is Kurdistan one of the wealthiest lands in the world anyway? Not by GNP or size of economy (in which case, the only Middle Eastern countries reaching the top 10 are Kuwait and Qatar). Neither can it claim the highest standard of living... and certainly not the largest amount of freshwater. They could only be talking about oil rich... in which case, it is true. However, much as I hate to tell you this, Iraq ranks a possible 4th after Saudi, CANADA (yes, can you believe it?) and Iran.