Western tourists in Iraq

Middle East/N.Africa — By Bob Riel on March 27, 2009 at 3:28 pm

I wrote last fall about the Iraq Board of Tourism and its goal of building a tourist infrastructure and attracting foreign visitors to Baghdad and other parts of the country. It seemed like a faraway dream at the time, but in fact Iraq just recently played host to its first Western tourists in six years. According to this story in the International Herald Tribune, the tour group completed a 17-day visit to Iraq, which the newspaper calls “one of the world’s ultimate danger destinations.” Despite the risks, the trip attracted an eclectic group of adventurous tourists, many of whom had previously visited such countries as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen.

Whether Iraq can be described as open is debatable. But Ms. Gilbert is a member of a group, mostly middle-aged and older, that has the honor of being on the first officially sanctioned tour of Westerners in Iraq since 2003 (outside of the much safer enclave of Kurdistan)…

The trip has not been nearly as perilous as most expected. On Friday night, six years after the American invasion began, a white-haired British man and woman bought big bottles of cold Heineken in central Baghdad, walking home in the dark. The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, which helped arrange the tour, had provided armed guards for the trip, but Mr. Hann said they were too restrictive. So the group had driven around, in a minibus, with little or no security. They have been to Babylon and Basra, Ur and Uruk, the Shiite shrines in Karbala and Najaf, places where, not so long ago, a visit would have made the return ticket unnecessary…

Just about everyone in the eight-person group has been to Afghanistan. (Also, perhaps unsurprisingly, everyone is single.) Insurance, which is not provided by the company, is nearly impossible to come by. For that reason, the tourists on these trips tend to be older because they have financial support networks and, Mr. Hann said, “because in the end you’ve been to places and you don’t really worry as much, if you know what I mean.”