|
Even more of Iraq, as seen through a visitor’s eyes
As first mentioned, three months ago, Thomas Hugger visited Iraq at the end of May 2025, and with me, embarked on a tour of the country that included business visits, cultural, and historic tours. Then we reviewed our visit to the Iraq Stock Exchange (ISX), the Bank of Baghdad, and Baghdad Soft Drinks, which were also featured during the AFC Iraq Fund section of Asia Frontier Capital’s latest quarterly webinar on 24th July 2025, providing its regular “Asian Frontier Markets Update”. Two months ago, we reviewed our visit to some of Baghdad’s old districts (Al-Madrasa Al-Mustansiriya, Al-Mutanabbi Street, and Al-Shawaka), the ancient cities of Babylon, and Ctesiphon. Last month, we reviewed our visit to the ancient city of Ur, the Marshes, and the meeting point of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers forming the Shatt Al-Arab at Al-Qurnah. This month reviews our visit to Iraq’s third largest city, Basra, and Thomas’s presentation to a business school in Baghdad. Our guide, as for the prior tours of Babylon, Ctesiphon, Ur, the Marshes, and Al-Qurnah, was Ali Ghanem Sarhan, one of my students at Baghdad Business School (BBS), who is now an independent freelance tour guide specialising in cultural and historical tours. His rich Instagram account (@alighanim.1) chronicles his criss-crossing the country with tourists from all over the world.
Basrah is the country’s third largest city, familiar to many from the fabled “One Thousand and One Nights”, and the adventures of “Sinbad the Sailor”, the city’s best known fictional character. The city was modern Iraq’s main access to the sea through Shatt Al-Arab (River of the Arabs) –Iraq is almost landlocked, with a coastline of less than 60 km long, squeezed between the Iranian and Kuwaiti borders, and with no natural harbours or bays. As such, its access to the sea is convoluted, with the Shatt Al-Arab featuring heavily, either through Basra’s ports, or the man-made ports built on small fishing villages on the tiny coastline paralleling the Shatt’s path as it discharges to the Gulf –such as Iraq’s primary deep water of Umm Qasr, and the major on-going construction of the multi-billion dollar Al-Faw Grand Port, that is part of Iraq’s ambitious “Development Road” project, designed to connect Asia to Europe.
Basra was founded in 638 as a military fort by Islam’s second Caliph. Its strategic location with its easy access to Shatt Al-Arab, the Tigris and Euphrates, and the Gulf, played a crucial factor in its development as a major metropolitan and a cultural centre. The flip side of this location was perennial conflict, often being a battlefield during wars, from its early days right through the twentieth century –the British invasion of Iraq in 1914 was through Basra, as was the US invasion in 2003. The city was damaged heavily during the Iraq-Iran war in the eighties and suffered during the country’s civil war post 2003 –with the years of neglect in between these conflicts, and their aftermath taking a heavy toll on the city.
We headed to Basra, late in the evening following our stopover at Al-Qurnah, the last part of the journey to Ur, and the Marshes. Along the 70 km drive, in the distance, we witnessed the massive flames from oil wells, made from flaring, i.e., burning of the natural gas, the by-product of oil production from the country’s largest oil fields, that lights the sky at night. The location of some of the country’s super-giant fields, among the world’s major ones, such as Rumaila or Majnoon, near Basra, has turned it into a major petroleum city and the country’s main oil export route. Sadly, the proximity to such wealth, and Iraq’s high flaring rates that accounted for 12% of the world’s total flare volumes in 2024, brought misery to the city’s peoples and its environment from the effects of the toxic pollutants released with flaring –the subject of the BBC documentary “Under Poisoned Skies” in 2023.
| 
