Catherwood LibraryILR School

Before April 2003, when the maze of crooked lanes that branch away from Rasheed Street downtown were crammed with hundreds of small leather goods factories, Hassan Attiya, now 43, designed fancy women?s shoes under his signature ?Cowboy? label. And his workers manufactured and sold them by the thousands. Now Mr. Attiya, humbled by security fears, the shuttering of Iraqi tanning factories that provided his raw materials and an avalanche of cheap imports from China and Syria since the invasion, hangs on in a crumbling former dentist?s office with a handful of workers. If all that were not crushing enough, as widespread violence generated by fighting in the south last month forced Mr. Attiya to close his factory, policemen in Baghdad stopped a car carrying goods he had ordered from Syria.