Eight Things I Learned From My Vacation In Iraq
Spoiler: Best vacation ever
Last year, I was talked into going on a two-week group tour of Iraq by a guy I interviewed on my Substack.
After making the down payment on that trip, I ended up dragging my feet on actually paying the remainder and committing to the trip due to the ongoing conflict between Israel and its allies on one side, and Iran and its proxies on the other, which had occasionally involved air, missile and drone strikes overflying Iraqi airspace.
By New Year’s I decided to pull the trigger and hope for the best. That decision ended up working out for me– the war never really did spill over into Iraq beyond what locals referred to as “the fireworks,” although it did end up having a major impact on tourism in Iraq this year- but more on that in a bit.
You’ll learn to recognize the Iraqi government-issue mustache
When I first arrived at Baghdad International Airport, I was greeted by one of our tour guides, who took me to customs and immigration. At the immigration desk, a young customs agent with a neatly-trimmed mustache set up a tripod-mounted camera and asked me to pose for a headshot. As the camera was about a foot shorter than me, I had to hunch over for the photo.
Queue a couple of his buddies having a chuckle over at one of their computer screens. The next woman in line comes up, and you can probably guess the punchline here: he adjusts the height of the camera for her. Of course he does.
On to the passport control line. I get to the front, where I’m greeted by another young officer with another neatly-trimmed mustache. He calls a couple more officers over to the little glass booth he’s in, they all have a laugh at my visa photo, and with that, I am officially granted entry into Iraq.
This became a pattern throughout my time in Iraq. At every checkpoint– and there are quite a lot of them in Iraq– my visa photo got a few laughs out of the guards.
And speaking of the guards, yes, they all have the same Super Troopers mustache. Always short and neatly-trimmed, never accompanied by a bear, stubble, or any other facial hair. As far as I can tell, this mustache is the standard uniform for Iraqi men who work in any sort of military or law enforcement capacity. In fact, it’s much more of a uniform than their actual uniforms, which come in a bewildering variety of camo patterns.
The only police or soldiers I ever saw without mustaches were young cadets who hadn’t earned their mustache yet, and one poor bastard who apparently couldn’t grow one.
Foreigners are rare, but the ones who do visit are cool
Officially, Iraq gets several million tourists a year from other middle eastern countries, as well as over half a million visitors a year from outside the middle east, most of whom come from Europe. And this is true, but it isn’t what it sounds like.
The middle eastern tourists are almost all visiting religious pilgrimage sites. The lion’s share of these go to Najaf, a city in southern Iraq which has the distinction of being Islam’s third most important pilgrimage site, after Mecca and Medina. You also see a few of them in Baghdad and Iraqi Kurdistan.
As for the “western” tourists, the vast majority are simply Iraqis who live overseas, visiting home. In fact almost all of the passengers on my plane flying into Baghdad– all but two or three– were Iraqis. The remainder of those western visitors are mostly business travelers.
Now, I mentioned earlier that the whole dust-up between Iran and Israel scared a lot of people out of visiting Iraq. As it happened, the tour I signed up for only had three people on it this year, out of a maximum of twelve. It came very close to being cancelled, but fortunately the tour company ended up combining it with another Iraq tour which consisted of five older (mostly retired) women.
If that sounds boring, well, it wasn’t. They were some of the most well-traveled people I had ever met, and they all had good stories– about volunteering in Georgia, taking a cruise to Antarctica, or backpacking across Europe. Even my roommate, a younger man from my own original tour group, spends several months every year travelling, and was headed to Iran after the end of our tour.
Basically what I’m saying is, boring people don’t visit Iraq.
The sheer rarity of foreigners meant that we were treated with friendliness and curiosity everywhere we went. This was made very clear to us on the first day of our tour, when a camera crew from the ministry of tourism started following us around a medieval madrassa. I’m still waiting to see that footage.
Iraq is very safe now
On the first day of my trip, I saw a man, apparently having some sort of psychotic break almost get shot by a group of security guards whop had drawn their guns on him. Thankfully, he was subdued and apprehended by the police.
That was in Los Angeles, a few hours before I went to the airport.
Before deciding to visit Iraq, I tried my best to find recent examples of foreigners getting hurt, kidnapped or killed in the country. The most I could find was one kidnapping in 2023 and one artillery strike in 2022.
Believe it or not, Iraq is no longer overrun by guys with scraggly beards. The guys with mustaches won.
There’s still a heavy security presence. You can’t drive an hour without hitting a checkpoint, and in major cities you’ll see a humvee with two soldiers in it every few blocks. That said, none of the soldiers ever seemed on edge, and most of the time, they just wanted to see passports, take selfies with us, and practice a few words of English.
The one place we visited that seemed like it could have been dangerous was Fallujah. For those who haven’t been, Fallujah is still covered in bullet holes and other visible damage from the war. Some of the locals might still be a bit resentful about that, so the local Interior Ministry detachment had a few troops escort us around town. Still, we found the locals to be nothing but friendly.
The one place you wouldn’t want to go– and at least as of recently, aren’t allowed to go– is Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown. The people there are still a bit sore about him being deposed.
Iraq’s official crime rate is actually close to that of the United States, so not particularly low. However, the specific types of crime that are prevalent in Iraq tend to be things like corruption, smuggling, drug dealing, abuse within families, and violence related to personal feuds. Crimes against complete strangers– even so minor as pickpocketing– are exceedingly rare.
So, Iraq is pretty safe, other than….
Except for the traffic. That part isn’t very safe.
Baghdad traffic is its own form of urban warfare. Lanes and turn signals are only suggestions, if they exist at all. Baghdad in particular is just gridlock, 24/7. Major streets are dotted with oversized roundabouts– again, with no lanes– in which people are constantly merging, and turning without warning. It is entirely common for drivers to turn in front of the lane next to them– again, completely without warning.
Don’t even think about trying to drive in Iraq. And you will be taking cars everywhere, as Iraqi cities are mostly too spread out to be easily walkable. Very limited public transportation exists in the form of buses, but hired cars are the way to go.
Iraq simply isn’t built for pedestrians. Even within cities, distances are long and sidewalks often end abruptly in rubble or open ditches. Somehow this constant gridlock never quite produces dense pileups in which nobody can move. Not quite.
One of the highlights of our trip was when Noor, our tour photographer– yes, the same guy who took some of these photos– jumped into our bus while it was still moving like a character from an action movie.
When I ask Baghdadis about the traffic, they say, well, at least it’s not Cairo.
Most cars look slightly dented, and accidents are commonplace. A car hit our tour bus at one point, and two other members of my tour group got into an accident in a rideshare vehicle the day before our tour began. To my mind, this is another good reason to take a group tour in Iraq: you’ll be safer riding in a large bus. That, and a good tour group will plan an efficient route. If you don’t know where you’re going, it’s easy to waste a lot of time on the road.
Be prepared for garbage and squat toilets
There’s no polite way to say it: Iraq has a trash problem. That’s pretty typical for developing countries, but it’s especially noticeable here. Garbage pickup is privatized in most of the country, and most people don’t pay for it, so outside of wealthy neighborhoods, garbage ends up strewn all over the sidewalks and the sides of highways.
It’s unfortunate– Iraq is a beautiful country, and it’s sad to see the landscapes marred by so much refuse. But of course, sanitation costs money, and Iraq is still far from wealthy, but it’s getting better. I expect the trash situation to improve over the coming years. In the meantime, you get used to it.
The squat toilets are a much bigger issue for most foreigners. They’re the norm in most places, and they often don’t smell good. Any decent hotel will have Western-style toilets, but outside of your hotel, you need to be prepared to hold your nose and squat.
You can see some amazing historical sites, but you need connections
I can’t even list off all the amazing things we did in Iraq, but I’ll try. We visited the Iraqi National Museum and saw the original tablets containing the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Baghdad Battery. Toured the marshes in southern Iraq and had breakfast on a farm. Toured the ruins of Babylon, and then one of Saddam’s palaces nearby. Got a guided tour of the Great Ziggurat of Ur from a man who lives on-site.
Visited an old Abassid-era palace, which we had entirely to ourselves. We had breakfast cooked for us by one of Saddam’s former personal chefs, in his own home. Spoke with an activist who was famously involved in the operation to recapture Mosul from ISIS, and then walked through the ruins of downtown Mosul. And my personal favorite, we toured the ruins of Hatra during a sandstorm.
The thing is, half these places weren’t just open to the public. The Abassid palace was closed for Eid, and we were fortunate that one of our tour guides knew some of the guards. Saddam’s palace was also closed, and we were probably the last people who got to tour it before it gets turned into a museum. And of course, our tour operators needed to know the chef, the tour guide at Ur, the farmer, the activist.
This is where having a good guide — or a well-connected one — makes all the difference, and it’s another reason why I highly recommend taking a group tour. There’s a lot of stuff in Iraq that you just won’t be able to do without connections.
The food is good, and there’s a lot of it
If you like grilled meat, Iraq will treat you well. Most meals begin with some soup and salad, followed by bread, multiple types of grilled meat– usually chicken, beef, or lamb– along with rice and hummus or various other side dishes. Even when we swore we weren’t hungry, the table would fill with enough food to feed a platoon. Meals weren’t just big; they were rituals. And then there’s the tea: black, a bit spicy, and powerful, served before and after meals.
You’ll see variations. Iraq’s national dish is masgouf, a kind of river carp (though technically the term refers only to the method of cooking) roasted vertically next to an open flame. It’s good, but oily enough that you won’t want to eat too much. There’s also a wide variety of yogurt with honey, date-based foods and syrups, flatbreads, and coffee is reasonably common as well.
Pizza is also common, and Iraqi hotels seem to have made cold or lukewarm pizza a standard breakfast food.
Iraqi food is flavorful, but not spicy. In fact, it doesn’t feel particularly exotic if you’re used to eating Middle Eastern food in the United States. There was never anything I just couldn’t eat. My personal favorites were the many varieties of differently colored and flavored rice, the chicken at this one roadside restaurant we ate at in southern Iraq, and a beef soup we had in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The portions will shock you. A meal intended for one person will easily feed two or three tourists. And yes, that’s how the locals actually eat. There are not a lot of thin Iraqis.
The locals are some of the most wonderful people you’ll ever meet
Every country says its people are friendly, but Iraq takes it to another level. Strangers would come up just to shake our hands and say “Welcome to Iraq!” — not once or twice, but often several times a day. People were curious to know where we were from, what we thought about Iraq. Restaurateurs offered us free food and drinks, while children wanted to take photos with us. One guy in Mosul even asked me for an American dollar bill as a souvenir, and he insisted on paying for it.
This isn’t the forced politeness I’ve seen in some places, nor is it the phony, pushy salesmanship you see in a lot of other developing countries. It’s genuine warmth, friendliness and hospitality. Iraqis are truly the kindest people I’ve met, and they want their country to be seen as a place worth visiting.
In a way, that’s why I visited Iraq, and why I wrote this article. In my lifetime Iraq has always been either a hostile dictatorship or an active warzone, up until just a few short years ago, and most Americans don’t even realize that it isn’t a warzone anymore. I think Iraq deserves to be seen as it is now: a beautiful country, rich in history and cultural attractions, filled with some of the loveliest people you’ll ever meet.
I can’t recommend Iraq highly enough. But if you do visit, find a good group tour (again, I recommend Wandering Earl) and be prepared for the squat toilets.
Had I known beforehand, I'd have invited you to Pakistan. Let me know if you ever come to Pakistan! Here is something you might enjoy:
https://www.businessinsider.com/humans-of-new-york-visits-pakistan-2015-8
Great article, very interesting!