The travel company’s instructions were simple: from Baghdad airport, take a taxi to the hotel. “Do what?” I exclaimed. The last time I visited Baghdad, during the vicious sectarian war unleashed by the US invasion of Iraq 22 years ago, the seven-mile highway leading to the heavily fortified Green Zone was the world’s most dangerous road in the world’s most dangerous city: a gauntlet of snipers, suicide bombers and exploding booby-traps where dozens died despite the US military’s best efforts to secure it.
But I did as I was told. My plane landed at 2.30am — gently this time, instead of corkscrewing down to avoid missiles. I hailed a taxi and sped into the Iraqi capital along a smooth, six-lane highway now lined — to my amazement — with water fountains, illuminated palm trees, floodlit mosques, new luxury apartment blocks and signs proclaiming “Welcome to Baghdad”.
Between 2003 and 2008 I had made half a dozen trips to Iraq for The Times, and my memories are unremittingly bleak.
We were forced to abandon our rented house when Sunni insurgents began abducting and executing westerners. We went nowhere without armed bodyguards and a back-up car, and could linger nowhere longer than 15 minutes. We fell asleep at night to the sound of gunfire and explosions. Our hotel, the al-Hamra, was badly damaged in one suicide bomb attack and destroyed in a second when Yasser, one of two wonderful brothers who served as our drivers, was killed.
I had no wish to return, but my curiosity was piqued when I read that a travel company in Wigan had begun offering tours of Iraq, notwithstanding the government’s advice against all non-essential travel to the country.
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Who on earth would go on holiday to such a place? Was Iraq, once synonymous with carnage, really safe now? What had become of a country that had so dominated the news in the early Noughties, but since been forgotten? And with the benefit of hindsight, had President George W Bush’s “three trillion dollar war” to remove Saddam Hussein and create a new Iraq — a war that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths — been worth it?
I asked the travel company, Lupine, if I could tag along. It agreed, but I was not meeting the rest of the group until the evening, so I had that first day in Baghdad to myself.
I had to steel myself to leave the hotel alone and unprotected: two decades ago, a substantial segment of the population wanted to kill westerners like me — and often did. But I found a city outwardly transformed.
Gone were the ubiquitous concrete blast walls and coiled razor wire, the charred shells of bombed-out ministries, the military helicopters clattering overhead, the heavily armed US Humvees, the endless checkpoints, the barricaded side streets and night-time curfews. The main roads through the Green Zone are now open and, except for the vast US embassy on the banks of the Tigris, no visible evidence remains of what Iraqis call al-ihtilal — the “occupation”.
The violence has ended too. Sunnis and Shias now rub along, though plenty of armed soldiers and police remain on the streets. Islamic State has been defeated. Just one westerner, an American teacher named Stephen Troell, has been killed in Baghdad in recent years, while a Jewish researcher, Elizabeth Tsurkov, was kidnapped in 2023 and remains a captive.
Baghdad is still a drab, ugly, litter-strewn city. There are still frequent power cuts. Armed guards still protect ministries, embassies, banks and other important buildings. But it is now commercially vibrant with teeming streets, clogged traffic and lots of new construction work. People promenade beside the Tigris, where I remember seeing mutilated corpses floating past. There are western-style shopping malls, children playing in parks and funfairs. I even found a new cinema showing a Mission: Impossible film. In the early Noughties, fun did not exist.
It took lunch with Haider, Yasser’s brother, to add perspective. “What you see is a picture, but there’s something under the table,” he told me in his idiosyncratic English. He explained how the US invasion, and Washington’s reprehensible lack of a plan for what came after, had triggered nearly two decades of misery — civil war between Iraq’s Sunni and Shia communities, the rise of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which metamorphosed into Islamic State (IS), and IS’s capture of most of northern Iraq between 2014 and 2018. “We haven’t had any good days since 2003… Every house, every family in Iraq has lost at least one person,” he lamented.
America had removed a brutal dictator, he continued, but bequeathed the country a weak, corrupt, Shia-dominated government that was beholden to Iran and Iranian-controlled militias. “Under Saddam it was a very bad situation, but now it’s even worse.” There was even some nostalgia for the former dictator, who had brutally suppressed Iraq’s Shia majority but at least kept order. Nobody liked America, he concluded.
Over the following week I heard Haider’s views echoed by numerous other Iraqis, both Sunni and Shia. Given that, it was astonishing how welcoming they were to the first westerners many had seen since America’s catastrophic military intervention effectively ended in 2011, routinely offering us water, tea and watermelon.
We’re told not to post our itinerary on social media
There were 14 in our group — eight Brits, three Americans, a Swiss, an Estonian and a Mexican. They included a young surveyor from Wolverhampton, an IT worker from Kilmarnock, a Tate Gallery librarian, a former banker from Tunbridge Wells and a theatre worker from Manchester. None were the “war tourists” I expected. Some were genuinely interested in the history and archaeology of what was once Mesopotamia — the so-called “cradle of civilisation” between the Tigris and Euphrates where the ancient Sumerians first developed the wheel, cursive writing, agriculture and urban centres. A couple were “country counters” bent on visiting every nation in the world. Most just liked to venture to offbeat places and had done previous Lupine tours to improbable destinations such as Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and Equatorial Guinea.
We stayed in mid-range hotels, ate like ordinary Iraqis and spent many hours in a cramped little bus that lacked curtains to protect us from the baking sun — the security forces have banned blinds so they can see who is inside. We were asked not to post details of our itinerary on social media, but took no other security precautions.
On day one, my different prism quickly became apparent. While my colleagues enjoyed the splendid friezes, statues, pottery, jewellery, cuneiform tablets and other antiquities of the Iraq Museum, which finally reopened in 2022, I remembered how it was looted in those chaotic first days after the US invasion. In war “stuff happens”, Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s defence secretary, blithely remarked. Scarcely half the 15,000 stolen items have been recovered.
‘Americans let the museum be looted’
Nearby, a director of the fine 13th-century al-Mustansiriya madrassa told me, “We warned the US troops, but they didn’t care. They let the museum be looted. I’m still angry.” He disliked Saddam, he added, but “he was strong and there was stability”.
At the century-old al-Shabandar coffee house in historic al-Mutanabbi Street, while my colleagues drank tea, I recalled how a huge car bomb had killed the owner’s four sons and grandson in March 2007 (the car’s mangled wreckage now sits in the atrium of the Imperial War Museum in London).
A fifth son, Salem al-Khashali, survived the blast and now sat by the door in front of his dead siblings’ photographs. Sadly, he speaks no English but a customer who does told me, “We didn’t accept Saddam as a leader, but at least there was security, stability and safety.”
That afternoon we visited the Martyr’s Memorial, a giant sculpture resembling two turquoise teardrops erected by Saddam after the Iran-Iraq war of the Eighties. It now commemorates the dead of all Iraq’s wars, including those that died during and after the US invasion.
Was that invasion justified, I asked the manager, Dr Moayad. “When Hitler tried to occupy your country, was it a good war?” he retorted. “Occupation is occupation.” He had 12 relatives killed by Saddam, he added, and three by the Americans, including a mother and baby shot at a checkpoint.
The most striking sight in Baghdad, however, was in Firdos Square, where jubilant Iraqis famously tore down Saddam’s statue in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. It is now dominated by a huge billboard showing Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels rejoicing as a US aircraft carrier burns behind them. So much for Bush’s plan to install a pro-western democracy in Iraq.
It is now illegal to display pictures of Saddam, but other vestiges of his 24-year tyranny survive.
‘Soldiers stole artefacts from Babylon’
From Baghdad we headed south to ancient Babylon, which was allegedly the world’s biggest city and site of the eponymous hanging gardens and Tower of Babel during Nebuchadnezzar’s reign in the 6th century BC. US troops occupied the ruins, using diggers to build defences and create helicopter landing pads. An official told me the soldiers also stole artefacts. But Saddam caused much greater damage in the Eighties. Seeking to bask in Nebuchadnezzar’s glory, he rebuilt Babylon’s walls and temples and turned the place into a glorified theme park.
Just as Nebuchadnezzar’s name is still visible on the original bricks, so we saw Saddam’s inscribed on the new ones. He also constructed a huge palace on an artificial hill overlooking Babylon. A caretaker let us in, and for 40 minutes we explored its vast and once magnificent interior. The fittings have long since been stolen, the walls are daubed in graffiti left by US soldiers and the floors are covered in debris and bird droppings, but the sheer vanity of the man who built such a place for himself remains unmistakable.
We continued southwards through the holy cities of Kerbala and Najaf, scenes of horrific suicide bombings during the civil war. There we joined the thousands of Shia pilgrims who worship round the clock at the glittering gold and silver tombs of Imam Hussain, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, of Imam Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, and — reputedly — of Noah and Adam. Najaf also boasts the world’s largest cemetery, a 900-hectare site containing six million graves of those who yearned to be buried near Imam Ali.
‘Thieves and militias run the government’
By now we were deep into Shia territory, and Iran’s baleful influence on its co-religionists was becoming everywhere apparent.
The towns, the cities and the highway through the scrubby desert landscape are festooned with portraits of Iranian-backed “martyrs” — the likes of Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian commander killed by an American drone strike in Baghdad in 2020; Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader killed in Gaza in 2024; and Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader killed by the Israelis in Beirut last year.
In Nasiriyah one evening, I interviewed a young man whose mother had been killed at an American checkpoint during the occupation. Sotto voce, he told me how Iranian-linked militias tied to the political parties in Baghdad now run most of southern Iraq. They determine who gets government jobs, take rake-offs from construction projects and suppress protests.
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“The government’s no good,” he said. “Thieves and militias run it.”
I had felt perfectly safe until then, but realised those Iranian-backed militias must know of our presence and could seize us at will.
Another indication of Iran’s increasing influence is Iraq’s lurch towards a stricter form of Islam. In recent years the government has banned alcohol, criminalised homosexuality and made child marriages possible.
But the most striking evidence came when we visited the Mesopotamian Marshes, which were once the size of Wales and allegedly inspired the biblical Garden of Eden. Drained by Saddam in the Nineties because they offered sanctuary to his opponents, and further damaged by dams on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, they have shrunk dramatically and most of the Marsh Arabs made famous by the British explorer Wilfred Thesiger have long since left for nearby towns.
After a short boat ride through reed-flanked channels (accompanied by eight policemen in two boats) we stopped at a silver-domed memorial to those Marsh Arabs killed in Saddam’s purge. We found it draped in banners depicting Soleimani and Nasrallah.
Is that what 4,598 US and British soldiers died for in Iraq? Far from “liberating” the country, Bush has propelled it into the arms of America’s bitterest enemy.
Materially at least, everyday life has improved
From the marshes we headed back to Baghdad up the same highway that I had travelled in 2007 with a mile-long US military supply convoy from Kuwait, braced for attacks by snipers and suicide bombers. Then the road was deserted, the surrounding desert littered with Iraqi tanks and other military vehicles destroyed during the US invasion. Now it is frequented by lorries carrying imports from Umm Qasr’s port and tankers carrying oil from Basra — evidence that, materially at least, everyday life in Iraq has improved.
We stopped to admire — all alone — the Ziggurat of Ur, a great pyramidical edifice dating from about 2100BC, which rises dramatically from the desert next to the ruins of the even older city of Ur, allegedly Abraham’s birthplace.
I’d been here in 2007 too. The Ministry of Defence had denied me permission to cover the British withdrawal from Basra that year because it smacked of defeat. Absurdly, a fortnight later, it sent a huge cargo plane to collect me from Baghdad so I could cover a cricket match between the British and Australian armies at a US airbase in the ziggurat’s shadow.
The “Ashes in the Desert” was played on a concrete strip in 43C, and the British were thrashed.
From Baghdad we continued north into predominantly Sunni territory and the security increased markedly: we were stopped endlessly at checkpoints manned by soldiers, police and militiamen. But there were rewards.
The first were the minarets of Samarra, which date from the 9th century BC and resemble stone helter-skelters with external ramps spiralling upwards. The best known is 171ft high and part of a Unesco world heritage site, but I preferred the second. Though shorter, it stands on a grassy plain outside the modern city and overlooks the ruins of an ancient mosque.
We also visited the extraordinary 9th-century sunken circular Palace of the Caliph, Dar al-Khalifa. The custodian, Abu Sais, recalled an American helicopter landing in its central pool during the war.
I asked if life was better now than under Saddam. “Saddam’s time was better,” he replied angrily. “There was no killing, no corruption. It was very safe. A curse on America.” Like many Sunnis, he half-believes that Saddam is still alive. “Only the Americans know,” he said.
An hour later we passed Saddam’s birthplace, al-Awja, where he was buried after his 2004 execution. His tomb was destroyed during IS’s occupation of northern Iraq, and the village is now fenced off and largely abandoned.
The dusty soil was littered with spent bullets
Shortly after that we drove through Tikrit, whose broad streets and fine buildings showed how Saddam lavished money on it. He had another palace here, overlooking the Tigris, but it too stands ruined and abandoned, as do most of the other palatial buildings in the compound.
I caught myself wondering whether, centuries hence, long after Saddam’s extreme brutality has been forgotten, archaeologists might discover those ruins and describe him as a great champion of Arab nationalism who battled the mightiest military in the world. Nebuchadnezzar was doubtless just as brutal in his day, but history is constantly rewritten.
The day’s second reward came several hot, dusty hours later when we left the highway and bumped several miles down a gravel track to another world heritage site: the ancient walled city of Hatra. Once again there was no gift shop, guides or other tourists, just a gentle late afternoon breeze that fanned us as we explored the remarkable ruins.
Then we met Sala, a genial middle-aged policeman from the modern town of Hatra, who had arrived for a stroll with his five children. He told us how Islamic State used the ruins as a camp when they occupied northern Iraq, terrorising the local people, executing opponents and refusing to return their bodies. He showed us where they broke the heads of statues and used 2,000-year-old columns for shooting practice. The dusty soil was littered with spent bullets. Isis graffiti was still scrawled on walls.
Had Saddam remained in power that tragedy “would not have happened”, he said. “There were no problems like this when Saddam was around. The country has been destroyed from the moment the Americans came in.”
Our tour ended in Mosul, Iraq’s second city, which Isis occupied from 2014 to 2017. For more than an hour we walked through scenes of unbelievable devastation in the old city, caused less by IS than by the airstrikes and extreme force that Iraqi and coalition forces had deployed to oust it.
Not a building is still habitable, not a window or roof still intact. The word “safe” is written in red paint on the walls of broken buildings to indicate that there are no mines or booby-traps inside, but structurally they are perilous. Old men sat near the rubble of their former homes.
But happily Mosul is bouncing back. Diggers and bulldozers are clearing the debris. With Unesco’s help, the city’s famously crooked 12th-century al-Hadba minaret has been rebuilt. On the edge of the devastation, a fish market and souk now flourish. At least some of the 500,000 inhabitants who fled IS are drifting back.
“Mosul is the place to be,” said an Irish-Iraqi woman who plans to emigrate from Dublin to her father’s city.
As we left for the airport we passed the site of the house where Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay, died in a protracted gunfight with American special forces in July 2003. The shattered house has since been razed. As with Iraq in general, what will eventually replace it is still unclear.
Martin Fletcher’s trip was made possible by Lupine Travel (lupinetravel.co.uk)
