SULAIMANI (ESTA) — Nearly 85,000 tourists have visited Sulaimani province in the past week, according to authorities, despite a surge in COVID-19 cases in the Region.
The tourists have entered the province through the border crossings and Sulaimani airport between July 15 and 23, said the directorate of media and tourism marketing in Sulaimani on Friday.
“Most of them were from central and southern Iraq,” it said in a statement.
More than 700,000 tourists have visited Sulaimani in the past six months, according to the general directorate of tourism in Sulaimani.
In the past days, Kurdish health officials warned of rapid spread of coronavirus, in particular the Delta variant.
On Friday, the health ministry said the Kurdistan Region recorded 1,598 new cases of COVID-19 and 12 deaths. As of Friday, the Region had registered 210,818 coronavirus infections, including 4,660 deaths, according to the ministry’s figures.
Despite the surge, authorities have eased measures once taken to contain the virus outbreak.
The tourism industry has been hit hard by the coronavirus in the Kurdistan Region. In 2020, the Region’s revenue from tourism dropped by 75 percent due to measures taken against the virus outbreak.
Over the past two decades, the Kurdistan Region’s economy had been heavily reliant on the oil and gas sector, which has driven the Region’s development.
Kurdish authorities have been trying to diversify but the collapse of world oil prices had dealt a heavy blow.
The tourism sector formed a key part of the diversification plans, injecting about $1.5 billion into the Region’s economy in 2019, according to Nadir Rosti, spokesman of the tourism directorate.
