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More of Iraq, as Seen Through a Visitor’s Eyes
As first mentioned two months ago, Thomas Hugger visited Iraq at the end of May, and with me, embarked on a tour of the country that included business visits, cultural, and historic tours. Last month, we reviewed our visit to the 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”. This month reviews 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. Next month, will review our visit to the ancient city of Ur, the Marshes, the meeting point of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers forming Shatt Al Arab at Al-Qurnah, and Iraq’s third largest city, Basra.
Our plan for the tour of some of Baghdad’s old districts was for a walkabout that would start with a visit to “Qasr Al-Abbasi (the Abbasid Palace)”, a magnificent structure built in the 12th century and one of the oldest historic buildings left standing in Baghdad. Baghdad was built in the 8th century, but many of its buildings and structures no longer exist due to a repeating pattern of destroying the old to build the new throughout the city’s history, many times using the old structures as building materials for the new. However, upon arrival, we found the site to be closed. Most of Iraq’s historic attractions’ opening hours aren’t consistent with tourism, in that they tend to follow official working hours, and so aren’t aligned with the likely schedules of tourists, foreign or domestic, especially during evenings, weekends, or holidays. This example highlights the need for a mindset shift to embrace tourism and unlock its values in contributing to job creation, and economic growth given the breadth and richness of the country’s history: “in the landscape of recorded history, Iraq is Everest: just as Everest makes other mountains seem small, Iraq makes ancient history seem recent by comparison”. The increasing influx of tourists encouraged by the relative stability that the country has been enjoying over the last few years has acted as a catalyst for such a shift. The first to respond has been the private sector with the construction of hotels and of those within the other sectors in the broader hospitality and tourism industry. Baghdad alone has over 20 new ongoing hotel and resort developments, in addition to those built recently and those that are being renovated, such as the Ishtar hotel that we reported on last month.
On the potential economic growth that tourism can provide, based on the experience of visiting AFC’s investable universe that include hidden gems for investment and tourist attractions, Thomas notes: “As we all know from our history classes, Mesopotamia, which is basically the region around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, was already settled 10,000 years BC and is considered one of the earliest civilisations. It was also the region where the wheel was invented and scripts, mathematics, astronomy and agriculture were developed. Needless to say, there are so many interesting places to see in an area multiple times bigger than, for example, the famous UNESCO World Heritage of Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, Cambodia, which attracts each year about 2.5 million tourists. I can easily imagine that, in the future, thanks to the stability in Iraq, more tourists will visit this country full of history, and the tourist arrivals will beat the figure of Angkor Wat, which is beautiful but much smaller than the entire Mesopotamia region.”
While we were disappointed with the closure of Qasr Al-Abassi, we were glad that the next item on our walkabout, “Al-Madrasa Al-Mustansiriya”, located within walking distance, was open. Al-Madrasa is an Abbasid era scholarly complex, built in the 13th century, which, in addition to Islamic religious studies, taught mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and philosophy. We were almost alone throughout the visit, with the exception of a few visitors, most of whom were foreign, who arrived just as we were leaving. While not my first visit, I was still impressed by the splendid architecture and the water-powered clock in the middle of the courtyard, which sadly is no longer in operation; while Thomas notes: “The complex reminded me of the architecture in places like Bukhara, Khiva and Samarqand in Uzbekistan. All of them are impressive and beautiful but in contrast to its Uzbek counterparts, hardly any visitors were to be seen in Baghdad. I am sure that will change soon.” Supporting Thomas’s last comment, such a change, overtime, could lead to Iraq being a major historical and cultural tourist attraction that coupled with the current, major but underutilized religious tourism, would support economic diversification and growth.
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