Every Friday evening, Nilufer Baran, who owns a nursery school in Diyarbakir, a city in south-eastern Turkey, locks up her premises and catches a shared taxi that travels 11 hours across the Iraqi border to the city of Erbil, where she and her husband run a popular restaurant.

Ms Baran is one of thousands of individuals in Turkey’s impoverished, mainly Kurdish south-east whose lives have been transformed by the implausible but undoubtedly real economic boom that is now sweeping northern Iraq. In the part of war-torn Iraq controlled by the autonomous Kurdish regional government (KRG), stability and relative prosperity reign. The result is that the region has seen an influx of foreign investment, adding to the prosperity.