Member-only story
Letter to Iraq
Iraq is different from what we think
I cannot say Iraq is the best or the most beautiful country, nor that the Iraqi people are the most hospitable because I have not been to many places yet. What I can say is that there is a high concentration of honestly helpful and friendly people in this country that I have never experienced before. Thanks to the Iraqi Travellers Cafe Facebook group that brings together tourists and locals, I received help even before setting foot in the country and made lasting friendships upon departure.
Even if we all heard from our school studies about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the biblical Eden, The Tower of Babel, the Code of Hammurabi, the earliest flourishing civilizations in the world in Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, we forget that almost all that is connected to today’s Iraq. This country made countless undisputable contributions to the world. It gave writing to the world, invented the wheel, planted the first cereal crops, introduced zero to mathematics, and even the tales of the Thousand and One Night were first told here.
There are tens of thousands of archeological sites in Iraq, most of them still waiting to be excavated. I was deeply touched by the ruins of the 5000-year-old ancient Sumerian city, Uruk, in a deserted, remote area, imagining this was where writing started. I watched the Tigris and Euphrates joining in Qurna, never expecting to get the chance to see that.
I discovered a lot during my almost 3-week journey from Baghdad, Babylon, Karbala, Najaf, Ukhaidir fortress, Kufa, Qurna, the Mashes, Ur, Uruk, Basra, Fallujah, Samarra, Mosul, Kirkuk, Erbil, Rawanduz and Soran, Lalish, Ahmedi, to the monasteries of Kurdistan.
I visited non-touristic places to get a better understanding of your country. I went to Al-Sadr, the former Saddam city, Al-Habbaniyah Tourist village, once a luxurious holiday resort of the Baathists, that now looks like a ghost town.
The country is full of sad stories, no matter which side they took during and after Saddam. Iraq suffered from one of the most severe economic sanctions ever imposed on a country. Mothers worried if their children returned from school or their husbands from work. There was an extreme shortage of medicine and nutrition, safety became an unknown concept…
