profile
Building bridges with the Middle East Samar Whitticombe has had a remarkable journey. Born in Iraq, she came over to the UK on a business trip in 1990 at the height of the Gulf War – and has been here ever since. Fortunately, however, the story had a happy ending. In November 1990, Samar’s husband was released and was able to come to the UK, where the pair eventually settled and married. Samar then embarked on a highly successful career in the UK, starting as an instrument engineer at infrastructure specialist Bechtel UK before going on to join engineering giant Amec Oil & Gas in 2002. While there she worked on a major project to rebuild parts of Iraq, which was in political turmoil due to the invasion of the country by a United States-led coalition that would eventually overthrow Saddam Hussein’s government.
In August of that year, her soonto-be-husband was not allowed to leave Iraq while Samar was in the UK. Unfortunately, due to the political circumstances she couldn’t get a flight back to Iraq so she spent the following weeks nervously awaiting her husband’s fate.
38
let’s talkbusiness
In 2008 Samar established her own company, Somer Industrial Projects (SIP), to use her experience of Iraq to provide training and business development services to companies in the oil, gas and power generation industries. She then won a major contract with Northern Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Governate (KRG) – a contract that provided work not just for her company but also for air conditioning specialist EWA Controls in Isleworth.
From our point of view, we’ll continue to provide skills and resources for projects in the Middle East, and we’ll try to involve other West London companies where we can.
