Iraq, 20 years on

At the magnificent sun-baked ruins of Ctesiphon, a former Silk Road city about 20 miles south of Baghdad, I scramble on to a mound to get some elevation for a photograph. I’m trying to capture the world’s largest single-span vaulted arch of unreinforced brickwork, now a fragile ancient structure propped up with scaffolding. I’m watched closely by a young shepherd casting his shadow across the scorched dust.

“Why does she want to come here?” the boy asks my interpreter.

“To see the arch.”

“Why doesn’t she just look it up on the internet?”

For most travellers, googling “Iraq” would be the beginning and end of any journey to this country — a “red list” destination (except for an orange swath denoting Kurdistan in the north-east), according to official UK travel advisories. For Americans, Iraq is red all over. I’ve come for several reasons. March 20 is the 20th anniversary of the US-led invasion — originally called Operation Iraqi Freedom — which seems a good moment to think about what happened, and why. Meanwhile, this October it will be 100 years since Gertrude Bell founded the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, a world-class repository of treasures from ancient Mesopotamia, many of which were looted in the chaos of 2003.

Travelling by horseback with a wardrobe of couture dresses and a gun tucked into her petticoats, Bell first explored the rivers Tigris and Euphrates in 1909, rummaging through the ruins of derelict civilisations. She later became involved in Anglo-Arab politics, and the founding of the modern state of Iraq (as it transpired, a less successful meddling).

Cut to 2023, and Iraq is by no means stable. It’s been ravaged by wars, Saddam Hussein and an Isis surge in 2014, which brought the world’s sixth-largest oil producer close to collapse. But it’s also just about functioning as a rare Arab democracy, with a new president elected last October. These green shoots have attracted a few pioneering tour operators. This month, Steppes Travel is sending its first private trips into Iraqi Kurdistan. The company says Michael Palin’s recent UK television series on Iraq has generated significant interest. When US-based operator MIR Corporation announced an inaugural group tour to southern Iraq for 2023, it sold out within 36 hours.

I decided to travel with Sara Barbieri, an experienced Middle East specialist at US- and UK-based tour operator Geographic Expeditions. Like me, Barbieri had been waiting for the right time to visit the country’s south and central regions. Our reconnaissance journey (ahead of GeoEx’s inaugural tours later this year) would comprise two weeks of slow travel from Basra to Baghdad, following more or less in Bell’s footsteps. I liked the idea of travelling with a woman, inspired by a woman. For that reason, I also packed one of my other favourite female travel writers: Freya Stark, and her stunning 1937 Baghdad Sketches.

We flew to Basra from Istanbul, and checked into a fancy new hotel, the Grand Millennium Al Seef Basra, which opened in May. The lobby swirled with bejewelled Iraqi brides done up in starched white dresses and dramatic stacks of hair. If this felt like a fortified pleasure island in a devastated city, it’s because it was; the Basra that Stark described in the 1930s as a “three-mile belt of gardens, under palm trees soft and woolly as green velvet” was unrecognisable. We took a boat along the Shatt al-Arab waterway, passing Hussein’s capsized pleasure cruiser, Al Mansur (“The Victor”), which was bombed during the war in 2003. There were rusting ships from the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, and riverbanks lined with headless palms.

But there were signs, too, of change. Fashionable young men with gelled quiffs posed for photographs on the main corniche among hawkers selling candyfloss. In the city’s historic quarter, we stumbled on a fabulous restaurant-museum, Al Hasun, which opened last year. Its souk-like warren of rooms was decorated with photographs, coloured glass, antique textiles, gramophones and 1950s memorabilia.

Unesco specialists were reconstructing Basra’s 19th-century Ottoman homes, the intricate latticework hinting at the wealth the city once commanded when it functioned as the riverine gateway to the Gulf. From a rooftop, I could see a mosque’s dome shaped like a swollen water drop, and an Armenian church. When we visited the church later that day, I got talking with the caretaker, a Muslim woman, who posed for her portrait under a painting of The Last Supper.

We drove north for Qurna, the site (so the story goes) of the biblical Garden of Eden. These days, Paradise is marked by a crooked Tree of Knowledge (not the original) in a dismal town park. But it was Iraq’s marshlands, among the largest wetland ecosystems in western Eurasia, that felt beyond redemption. When we took a long boat ride through the slow-moving channels, I was struck by the absence of birds. The British poet Jenny Lewis wrote in her 2014 collection, Taking Mesopotamia: “When Saddam cleared them and drained/ The marshes people said Iraq has stopped breathing.”

I wanted to believe otherwise, given the hopes and hospitality of the local family who served us masgouf, a delicious charred carp, in their house made of woven reeds. I was inspired by the impassioned local volunteer force we met who were collecting rubbish, a conversation with a foreign conservation NGO, and a group of Iraqi scientists undertaking critical research work. “The marshes are incredibly important to tourism and Iraq’s biodiversity,” said Obaida Ali, a masters student in ecology, who was at the same homestay. “If we can bring those two things together, and repair the damage, the area has the potential to be an icon for Iraq, like the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.”

Over dinner that evening Barbieri said: “It’s going to be hard to explain this journey to people in search of the picturesque. You have to be one of those travellers who wants to understand Iraq in the context of its present, to be willing to accept the destruction our governments contributed to when we broke this country, to accept that we went so much further than ousting Hussein.”

I was pleased to be moving on. I liked the feeling of being on a road trip as I watched the country moving past on the highway to Nasiriyah, Iraq’s fourth-largest city. Then, a glimpse of the Mesopotamian romance that captured Bell’s imagination: the 4,000-year-old Ziggurat of Ur, its central steps etched sharp against the sky. Ur’s story came alive with a telling from our guide, Dhaif Muhsen, the grandson of the site’s caretaker when Bell visited. I found it ravishing, the way he described how these links endured, and that there was still so much left to excavate, evidenced by shards of pottery lying on Iraq’s settled dust.

We drove on to Uruk, the Sumerian city of the protagonist-king featured in The Epic of Gilgamesh, the world’s oldest known piece of literature. And then a scene that made me think of people on 19th-century grand tours who came to Mesopotamia in search of Orientalist romance. There were no other visitors apart from us and four men, who were at their easels painting Uruk’s ruins en plein air: the watery sky, the swell and fall of sand, the blocks of ancient masonry, and an unusual, jewel-like flush of grass in an otherwise treeless expanse.

By the time we arrived at Ukhaidir, a 1,200-year-old palace from the Abbasid dynasty, I couldn’t get enough of these desert sites. Bell called this imposing fortress “the most undreamt-of example of the finest Sassanian [sic] art that ever was”. She found 20 families lodging in the former chambers of princes, the sheikhs passing along the passage like phantoms, trailing their white robes. She described melancholic Arab song rising from the citadel’s immense corridors and vaulted halls. In this same empty palace, I startled two owls. They swooped into the Escher-esque labyrinth of rooms and stairs, disappearing into a building with a lost scale.

I was hooked, seesawing between wonder and frustration: there was too much to see in Iraq, too many layers of past and present. This crescendoed in Najaf, a Shia pilgrimage site where a river of women bore us along in their mumbling tide towards the heart of Imam Ali’s shrine. The crowd flowed between marble pillars, over crimson carpets and under arches skinned in thousands of tiny, mirrored tiles. The “devotional babel” (Stark’s phrase) was unlike anything I’d encountered: an abundance of prayer, the tears of the faithful, the carved woodwork polished by impassioned hands. Nor could my eye take in the scope of Najaf’s Wadi-al-Salam cemetery where an estimated 6mn Muslims are buried. I tried to absorb the view from the top floor of a multi-storey car park: tombs like fallen dominoes, turquoise domes, mourning women in black abayas.

The next holy city, Karbala, raised the bar again. This is where Hussein, the martyr hero of Shia Islam, was killed in 680. These days, his shrine attracts up to 20mn pilgrims a year. The throng — from Iran, Pakistan and India — once again swept us into its folds, people seeping into every corner of not just the mosque but the busy promenades and long, twilit bazaars. “One cannot distinguish faces; the murmuring figures glide by like flowing water,” wrote Stark. “The extraordinary unity of Islam comes over me.”

By the time we’d reached Baghdad, I regretted my decision to limit my trip to two weeks (Barbieri was going on to Mosul and Kurdistan). We stayed in a smart hotel, the Babylon Rotana, close to the new Zaha Hadid-designed Central Bank of Iraq. I preferred the older part of the city where, in 1928, Stark rented a Baghdad “doll’s house in the slum”, among dim alleys that echoed with “the sobbing flutter” of pigeons. It was in one of Baghdad’s coffee houses that a man in a peaked cap urged me to join his table. A former journalist, he was tortured for four years in one of Hussein’s jails.

“After the fall of Saddam, people hoped there would be a flourishing of civil life — art, music, theatre,” he said. “They hoped it would go back to how it was in the 1970s, before the dictatorship began to be felt.”

I asked if he was optimistic for Iraq.

“It’s better than it was, but it’s not what we were hoping for. The best talent is being used for studying the Koran. I don’t believe in God. I believe in people’s hopes in civil life. Even in prison, I still believed in art. When I was a political prisoner, we taught each other English. We made musical instruments from kitchen tools.”

I looked around me, at the hum of humanity: a father and son sharing a piece of cake, two older women, smoking and talking intensely. I felt immersed in the acoustics of a city’s thriving secular life — a feeling that came alive again in the Iraq Museum, among everyday Iraqis walking through rooms filled with exquisite, hard-won history. I lingered among Babylonian gods and figurines, among alabaster reliefs carved with Assyrian kings, their tight curls shaped like snails. The detail felt alive: an archer’s bow pulled taut as if the arrows might spring from the stone; the flex of a finely muscled arm; an ivory hare, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand; the neck of a 7,000-year-old jar, which looked like Picasso might have copied it, the clay painted with the face of a woman crying.

Leaving Baghdad in the middle of the night, I narrowed my eyes and tried to imagine how the Tigris used to be, when the water was so still that, as Bell wrote, “you can see the Scorpion in it, star by star”. The river gave no romance back. It felt as black and silent as a slick of oil. Yet somehow, it was still flowing. There was something in this country I didn’t want to leave, in the Iraqi people whose first word is “Welcome” every time. I thought again about the shepherd at Ctesiphon, and the reasons why I’d come. Iraq is not for everyone, but then not every journey needs to be an escape. Iraq is different; it’s an affirmation of the indomitability of culture, of continuity and resilience — of a spirit as enduring as those alabaster reliefs.

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