Last updated: August 2026. Population figures re-checked against the 2024 census tables released by Iraq’s Ministry of Planning; airport status, FCDO advisory bands and site access re-checked in the week of 12 August 2026.
In November 2024 Iraq counted its people properly for the first time since 1987, and the results quietly rearranged a lot of what gets written about the cities in Iraq. Kirkuk turned out to be bigger than Erbil. Basra had shrunk since the last estimate. And the tidy round figure most travel pages still print — Baghdad, population eight million — turned out to be a projection nobody had checked against a real headcount in a very long time. Cities are only part of the map — the full picture is in our guide to the best places in Iraq.
Of the cities in Iraq you might reasonably want to see, about eleven are realistically visitable in 2026 — Baghdad, Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, Duhok, Zakho, Mosul, Basra, Najaf, Karbala, Nasiriyah and Hillah — most of them more comfortably with a guide than alone. Samarra works as a day trip under specific and slightly tedious conditions. Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit and Kirkuk are, for practical purposes, closed to you.
It helps to keep the scale of this in perspective. Iraq recorded roughly 556 European and American tourists in the whole of 2024. Not 556,000. Five hundred and fifty-six. Millions of people cross the border every year, but almost all of them are pilgrims from Iran, Pakistan, India and the Gulf heading for Karbala and Najaf. In most Iraqi cities you will be the only Western visitor anyone has seen that week, and that shapes everything from how long you spend at checkpoints to how many people want a photograph with you.
This guide gives both halves of the question. First the reference data — every major Iraqi city with its 2024 census population, and the reason city and governorate figures differ so wildly online. Then the travel answer: which cities are open, what each one is actually for, what the airport is doing in 2026, and where the honest advice is simply don’t.
The short answer
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| How many cities in Iraq are there? | 19 governorates; around 30 urban centres above 145,000 people at the 2024 census |
| Biggest city? | Baghdad, 7,837,463 in the city proper — nearly six times the next one |
| Which cities are open to tourists? | Baghdad, Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, Duhok, Zakho, Mosul, Basra, Najaf, Karbala, Nasiriyah, Hillah |
| Which are not? | Fallujah, Ramadi, western Anbar, Tikrit, Kirkuk |
| Guide or independent? | Erbil, Sulaymaniyah and Duhok are straightforward alone. Federal cities are easier with a guide; Mosul and Samarra effectively require one |
| Easiest city to start with | Erbil — visa on arrival, walkable centre, no permit theatre |
| Hardest thing about moving between them | Checkpoints, not distance. Expect to be stopped two or three times a day |
| Are the airports working? | Yes, but 2026 has brought repeated short-notice closures. Never book a same-day onward connection |
How big are the cities in Iraq? The 2024 census, properly
The census was enumerated over two days, 20–21 November 2024, and the headline results were announced on 24 February 2025. It was the first complete national count since 1987 — the 1997 exercise excluded the Kurdish governorates, and the 2010 attempt was abandoned. Everything published about Iraqi city sizes between 1988 and 2024 was an estimate built on an estimate.
The total came to 46,118,793: 45.78 million Iraqi citizens plus 340,131 foreign residents. The Kurdistan Region accounted for 6,519,129. Halabja was still counted as part of Sulaymaniyah at the time; it became Iraq’s 19th governorate on 14 April 2025, after the enumerators had been and gone.
Here are the ten largest urban centres, with the governorate they sit in alongside. The two columns are not the same thing and confusing them is the single most common error in English-language writing about Iraqi cities.
| City | City population (2024 census) | Governorate | Governorate population |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baghdad | 7,837,463 | Baghdad | 9,780,429 |
| Mosul | 1,529,384 | Nineveh | 4,261,980 |
| Basra | 1,293,052 | Basra | 3,664,168 |
| Kirkuk | 1,249,197 | Kirkuk | 2,034,627 |
| Erbil | 1,001,219 | Erbil | 2,517,534 |
| Najaf | 830,664 | Najaf | 1,950,833 |
| Sulaymaniyah | 828,850 | Sulaymaniyah | 2,287,798 |
| Karbala | 784,219 | Karbala | 1,754,065 |
| Nasiriyah | 704,976 | Dhi Qar | 2,499,468 |
| Amarah | 668,356 | Maysan | 1,293,636 |
And the next tier, which is where most of the confusion about “how many cities in Iraq are there” actually lives:
| City | 2024 census | Governorate |
|---|---|---|
| Kut | 506,067 | Wasit |
| Hillah | 470,917 | Babil |
| Duhok | 452,967 | Duhok |
| Diwaniyah | 396,257 | Al-Qadisiyah |
| Fallujah | 308,457 | Anbar |
| Zakho | 297,254 | Duhok (a district, not a governorate) |
| Ramadi | 295,105 | Anbar |
| Samarra | 203,089 | Salah al-Din |
Halabja city, for completeness, counted 75,922 against a governorate total of 113,926 — the smallest governorate in the country by a wide margin.
One caveat worth stating rather than hiding. The Ministry of Planning’s announcement put the urban share of the population at 70.17%. The locality-level tabulation of the same census splits 28,310,583 urban against 17,808,210 rural, which is closer to 61%. Both numbers come from the 2024 count; they use different definitions of what counts as an urban locality. If you see either quoted as gospel, that is why.
City or governorate? Why the population figures you find online disagree
Almost every disagreement you will find about the size of cities in Iraq comes down to this one distinction. Mosul city is 1,529,384 people. Nineveh governorate, of which Mosul is the capital, is 4,261,980. Both numbers are correct; they measure different things. A page that says “Mosul, population 4.3 million” has silently swapped one for the other, and once you notice it you will see it everywhere.
The same trap catches Erbil — a million in the city, two and a half million in the governorate — and Basra, where the governorate is nearly three times the city. It matters for practical reasons as well as pedantic ones. Advisory notices, and the security bands that follow from them, are written by governorate. When the FCDO advises against all travel to Ninawa province, that covers Mosul, Tal Afar, Hatra, Nimrud, Lalish and a large stretch of empty plain, all under one heading, without distinguishing between them.
There is a third figure floating about, too: projected estimates. Several large reference sites currently give Baghdad as 8,001,223, which is a 2026 projection rolled forward from older data rather than a count. It is not wrong as a projection. It is just not the census, and if you are comparing cities you want to be comparing like with like. Wikipedia’s list of Iraqi cities carries the census column but leaves it blank for several mid-sized cities and reports Zakho at 398,876, a figure we could not reconcile with the census tabulation of 297,254. We have used the census figures throughout and flagged them as such.
The cities in Iraq you can actually visit
Here is the practical matrix for the cities in Iraq that receive visitors at all. “Advisory band” is the current UK Foreign Office position as of its 22 July 2026 update, which is regionalised rather than blanket — a change most competing pages have not caught up with. The US State Department position is simpler and uniform: Level 4, do not travel, anywhere in Iraq, reissued 2 March 2026.
| City | Realistic access | FCDO band | Airport | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baghdad | Yes — guide strongly advised | All but essential travel | BGW, open | Mutanabbi Street, the Tigris, Abbasid remains |
| Erbil | Yes — independently | All but essential travel | EBL, open, disrupted | The citadel; the easiest arrival in the country |
| Sulaymaniyah | Yes — independently | All but essential travel | ISU, open, disrupted | Amna Suraka, bazaar, mountains, rain |
| Duhok & Zakho | Yes — independently | All but essential travel | None; drive from EBL | Gateway to the Amedi and Turkish-border country |
| Mosul | Yes — with a guide, day trip | Against all travel | OSM, domestic only | Al-Nuri mosque, al-Hadba minaret, the Old City |
| Basra | Yes — guide advised | All but essential travel | BSR, open | Shatt al-Arab, canals, Basrah Museum |
| Najaf & Karbala | Yes — no permit needed | All but essential travel | NJF, open | The two great Shia shrines; Wadi al-Salam |
| Nasiriyah & Hillah | Yes — as bases | All but essential travel | None nearby | Ur and the marshes; Babylon |
Baghdad
Nearly eight million people, and nothing else in the country is remotely comparable. Baghdad is not a beautiful city in the postcard sense — it is a sprawling, hot, hard-working capital that has been rebuilt in a hurry several times — but it is the only place in Iraq where you get the full national texture in one afternoon. Al-Mutanabbi Street on a Friday, the book stalls out on the pavement and the Shabandar café at the end of it, is the single most quoted experience in the city and it deserves the reputation.
Two things worth correcting. The Green Zone is no longer the sealed enclave that older guides describe: the concrete barriers that went back up during the escalation earlier this year were removed from 4 March 2026 and the gates have since reopened to pedestrians and vehicles. And the Iraq Museum, which almost every “things to see in Baghdad” page lists as open, has been shut since July 2025 for a maintenance programme. A reopening has been expected since early 2026 but no announcement has been confirmed. Check before you build a day around it.
Practically: your hotel books you a driver, you carry your passport, and you accept that you will be stopped and asked where you are going. Our full guide to Baghdad goes into the neighbourhoods in detail, and the separate piece on whether Baghdad is safe right now deals with the risk picture properly rather than in one hedged sentence.
Erbil
A million people, and the softest landing in the country. The Kurdistan Region runs its own visa regime — visa on arrival is still available at Erbil and Sulaymaniyah for many nationalities where federal Iraq scrapped it in March 2025 — so a great many first-time visitors arrive here without ever dealing with the federal e-visa system. Be clear that a Kurdistan visa is a separate document and does not entitle you to travel south into federal Iraq. Travellers have been turned back attempting exactly that.
The citadel is the reason people come, and it needs a caveat. It is not a free-flow site. It reopened on a limited schedule — initially one day a week from May 2025 — and most of the back streets inside remain fenced while a four-year, US$10 million restoration signed in October 2025 gets under way. Opening days in August 2026 could not be confirmed from any official source; ask at your hotel the day before.
Sulaymaniyah
Almost exactly the same size as Najaf, and completely unlike it. Sulaymaniyah sits at altitude with mountains on three sides, gets 722 mm of rain a year — more than any other major Iraqi city — and drops below freezing in January. It is the most relaxed city in the country to walk around, the bazaar is genuinely a working bazaar rather than a heritage exercise, and Amna Suraka, the former Ba’athist security headquarters turned museum, is free to enter and closed on Fridays.
Getting there overland from Erbil takes three to four hours. The Turkish Airlines ban on Sulaymaniyah airport, imposed in April 2023, was fully lifted in October 2025 and Istanbul flights ran daily from March 2026 before being suspended again in mid-July — which tells you most of what you need to know about planning air travel in Iraq this year.
Duhok and Zakho
Duhok, 452,967 people, is the third city of the Kurdistan Region and the base for the mountain country along the Turkish border. Zakho, 297,254, is a district of Duhok governorate rather than a governorate in its own right — another distinction the reference pages routinely get wrong — and is best known for the Delal bridge over the Khabur. Neither has an airport; you drive from Erbil, about two and a half hours to Duhok.
Worth knowing: the Runaki programme, which brought round-the-clock mains electricity to more than 85% of the Kurdistan Region by April 2026 and reached roughly 5.5 million people, has changed what evenings feel like in these cities. The generator hum that defined Iraqi urban life for twenty years is fading in the north and has not in the south. Our Iraqi Kurdistan guide covers the region in full, and there is a separate, more careful piece on how safe Kurdistan actually is given the drone and missile activity of July and August 2026.
Mosul
The second city, 1.53 million people, and the one where the gap between the headlines and the ground is widest. Al-Nuri mosque and the al-Hadba minaret reopened on 1 September 2025 after a UNESCO-led programme costing more than $115 million; the minaret was rebuilt using around 26,000 of its original bricks. Almost every page-one article we read still describes both as under reconstruction.
What has not changed is the surrounding advisory. Ninawa province sits in the FCDO’s “against all travel” band, which invalidates most travel insurance, and the Old City remains a working demolition site — roughly 11 million tonnes of rubble and 10,000 damaged buildings, with UNMAS estimating more than another decade of clearance. In practice Mosul is visited as a guided day trip from Erbil, about two hours each way. Mosul airport was inaugurated in July 2025 and took its first scheduled domestic passengers in November 2025, with an Umrah charter to Madinah in January 2026 as its only international departure so far; there is no scheduled international network to fly into.
We have a dedicated Mosul guide and a straight assessment of whether Mosul is safe to visit. Read both before committing; this is the one city on the visitable list where the advisory band and the traveller experience diverge most sharply, and that divergence is your decision to make, not ours.
Basra
1.29 million people, the only real port, and the hottest inhabited place in Iraq — the August mean maximum is 47.1°C and the national record of 53.9°C was set here on 22 July 2016. Nobody sensible walks around Basra between eleven and five in summer. The city works in the evening: the corniche along the Shatt al-Arab, the old Ashar canals, and the crumbling Ottoman-era houses of the Old Basra district that a slow restoration effort keeps almost saving.
The Basrah Museum, in one of Saddam’s former palaces on the waterfront, is open with four galleries and has a history of unpredictable weekend closures. Entry is reported at 25,000 dinars for foreigners against about 3,000 for Iraqis, which is the de facto standard at federal sites; there is no published fee schedule anywhere in Iraq, so treat every price in this article as traveller-reported rather than official.
Basra is also the natural end point for a run through southern Iraq, and the question of how safe Basra is gets a fuller answer there than it does here.
Najaf and Karbala
Together these two hold about 1.6 million residents and receive more visitors than the rest of the country combined. Karbala took more than 22 million arrivals during Arbaeen alone this year — the observance fell on 4 August 2026 — including around five million from abroad, the first time the foreign figure has passed five million. For context, the entire non-pilgrim Western tourist count for 2024 was 556 people.
Neither city requires a special permit. Your ordinary Iraqi visa is sufficient and there is no authorisation letter to chase; this is worth saying plainly because a lot of forum advice claims otherwise. Entry to the Imam Hussain and al-Abbas shrines in Karbala is free and access is effectively round the clock, though no official hours are posted. Whether non-Muslims may enter is genuinely contested: multiple recent first-hand accounts describe walking in with only clothing checked and religion never asked, the shrine authorities publish no policy either way, and we could not find a single dated report of a non-Muslim being refused at either city in 2024–2026. That is not a promise of entry. The practical barrier is dress and the discretion of the officer at the gate.
Women need an abaya and hijab, or a chador, across the whole shrine district rather than only inside it, with hair fully covered and socks on. Phones are generally allowed; cameras generally are not. There are free lockers at the gates — note your gate number, because it is how you find both your shoes and the person you came with.
Najaf, 830,664 people, is the quieter and older of the pair — the Hawza seminary has been teaching since 1056, and Wadi al-Salam on the city’s edge is certified by Guinness as the world’s largest cemetery, somewhere in the range of 6 to 10 square kilometres with roughly fourteen centuries of continuous burial. It is on Iraq’s UNESCO tentative list, submitted in 2011, and is not an inscribed World Heritage site whatever you may read elsewhere. If the religious dimension is why you are coming, the pillar guide to pilgrimage in Iraq is the place to start.
Nasiriyah and Hillah
Neither is a destination in itself; both are the door to something significant. Nasiriyah, 704,976 people, is the base for the ziggurat of Ur and for Al-Chibayish and the southern marshes about 90 kilometres away. Ur has been closed for a seventh restoration campaign with reopening targeted for July 2026 — whether it has actually reopened we could not confirm as of mid-August, so check before making the drive.
Hillah, 470,917, is the town beside Babylon. Babylon is reachable independently, roughly 90 minutes by taxi from Baghdad, with no permit and no escort required; entry is around 25,000 dinars and a guide about 15,000. It received 43,530 Iraqi and 5,370 foreign visitors in 2024, which makes it comfortably the most-visited ancient site in the country. There is much more on both in the guide to Iraq’s World Heritage sites and in the wider survey of Mesopotamian sites.
Samarra — the awkward one
Samarra, 203,089 people, sits in Salah al-Din, which the FCDO puts in its “against all travel” band. It is nonetheless visited, as a day trip from Baghdad, for the ninth-century Malwiya spiral minaret. The conditions are specific: checkpoints on the approach are run by Saraya al-Salam, thirty to sixty minutes of questioning is normal, and foreigners are not permitted to stay overnight — the hotels are closed. Entry is around 25,000 dinars. Sources conflict on whether the spiral ramp can currently be climbed; recent first-hand accounts say yes, others report a restoration closure. Non-Muslim access to the al-Askari shrine is unconfirmed, so plan on seeing it from outside.
The cities you cannot visit, and why we are not going to dress it up
Four of the larger cities in Iraq come up repeatedly in searches and none of them is a realistic destination in 2026. We are not going to pad them out with things you cannot see.
Kirkuk (1,249,197) is the fourth-largest city in Iraq and sits under an outright FCDO “against all travel” advisory covering the whole province. Its citadel is on the UNESCO tentative list and the city is genuinely historic. It is also the centre of an unresolved territorial dispute between Baghdad and Erbil, and foreigners attempting to visit are routinely turned back. The airport handles normal civil operations; that does not make the city open to you.
Tikrit (150,628) is in Salah al-Din, also “against all travel”, with no tourist infrastructure of any kind. Fallujah (308,457) and Ramadi (295,105) technically sit in the milder “all but essential travel” band — the stricter zone begins west of Ramadi City — but the advisory band is not why you cannot go. There is nothing set up to receive visitors, and the checkpoints on the Baghdad–Anbar road do not wave foreigners through. Western Anbar beyond Ramadi is “against all travel” and should be read as meaning exactly that.
There is also Jurf al-Sakr, renamed Jurf al-Nasr, in Babil. It is not a tourist question at all but it appears on maps between Baghdad and Karbala and people ask. It has been a sealed military zone since 2014, held by Kataib Hezbollah, mined and closed even to its own residents — more than 120,000 displaced people, whose return the Babil governor publicly ruled out again in June 2026. The Baghdad–Karbala highway does not pass through it; the route runs south on Highway 8 through Mahmudiya, Latifiya and Iskandariya, then west on Highway 9 across the Euphrates at Musayyib.
If you want the advisory picture in full rather than city by city, the travel advisory explainer sets out what each government actually says and what the practical consequences are — chiefly that travelling against FCDO advice voids most insurance policies.
Flying between the cities in Iraq: airports in 2026
This is the part of the trip most likely to go wrong, and the part almost no published guide has current. Iraq sits inside a live regional conflict. US and Israeli strikes on Iran began on 28 February 2026 and Iraq closed its airspace that day for roughly six weeks; the civil aviation authority reopened all airports on 8 April. A further 72-hour closure followed on 7 June, and there were diversions again on 8–9 August. EASA’s Iraq bulletin CZIB-2026-05, issued 8 July 2026 and valid to 31 August, advises EU operators to avoid the Baghdad flight information region at all altitudes.
| Airport | Status, August 2026 |
|---|---|
| Baghdad (BGW) | Open, around 90% of capacity restored. Turkish resumed 14 May, Qatar 10 May. Emirates suspended, with a daily Dubai service due to restart 1 October 2026 |
| Erbil (EBL) | Open but repeatedly disrupted. Turkish and Pegasus suspended from 17 July; flights halted the evening of 21 July after nearby strikes; Qatar resumed 8 August |
| Sulaymaniyah (ISU) | Turkish ban lifted October 2025, Istanbul daily from March 2026, suspended again mid-July 2026 |
| Basra (BSR) | Open |
| Najaf (NJF) | Open, pilgrim-dominated — 43 routes to 24 destinations on 17 airlines, none European. Halted 6–9 July 2026 |
| Mosul (OSM) | Domestic scheduled flights only since November 2025; no international network |
| Kirkuk (KIK) | Civil operations normal — but the city is under an “against all travel” advisory |
One structural fact to plan around: Iraqi Airways and Fly Baghdad are both on the EU Air Safety List, so no Iraqi carrier may operate into the European Union. Your realistic connections are Istanbul, Doha, Dubai, Amman and Beirut. Build a night of slack into any onward connection and never book same-day. Overland is often the better answer anyway — the guide to getting around Iraq covers shared taxis and coasters, which is how almost everyone actually moves between cities.
How many cities in Iraq can you realistically fit into one trip?
Fewer than you think, because the friction is not distance. Iraq is compact — Baghdad to Karbala is under 100 kilometres — but you should expect to be stopped at checkpoints two or three times a day as a minimum, and roughly hourly on the highways. Foreigners are usually asked to step out, hand over a passport and state a destination, so have your hotel name ready. Visa dates written in English format confuse soldiers and cause delays. Carrying photo identification is a legal requirement, not a courtesy. The checkpoints explainer goes through what actually gets asked.
Three shapes work well. A first trip of about a week does Erbil, Sulaymaniyah and Duhok, entirely within the Kurdistan Region and its own visa regime. Ten days on the federal side does Baghdad, Karbala, Najaf, Nasiriyah and Basra, north to south, ending at the marshes. Two weeks with a federal e-visa can link both halves — Erbil, a Mosul day trip, then south — but the visa has to be the federal one and it has to be sorted first. The itinerary guide lays these out day by day.
Also worth weighing: road traffic injures far more visitors to Iraq than anything political. Iraq recorded 2,351 road deaths in 2025, and Baghdad alone accounts for around 19.5% of national crashes. Choosing a driver carefully is a more consequential safety decision than most of the ones travellers agonise over.
When to go, city by city
The cities in Iraq do not share a climate. Baghdad’s July mean maximum is 44.0°C and Basra’s August mean maximum is 47.1°C, with the 50°C-plus window running from mid-June to mid-August — Karbala and Najaf both touched 50°C on 12 August 2026. Erbil is barely cooler in summer at 42.4°C, but Sulaymaniyah drops to a January mean minimum of −0.6°C and the Kurdish mountains hold snow from mid-December into March.
Rain falls November to April, about 90% of the annual total. Dust is the other seasonal factor and is chronically under-mentioned: Iraq’s Environment Ministry counts 272 dusty days a year, with the sharqi winds running April to early June and again from late September, and the shamal from mid-June to mid-September. The storm of 14–15 April 2025 put 3,747 people in hospital and closed both Basra and Najaf airports.
For most people that makes October to April the answer, with March and April best if the marshes are on your list. The seasonal guide breaks this down properly, and if you are travelling in Ramadan — 8 February to 9 March in 2027 — or during Arbaeen, plan around it rather than into it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the largest city in Iraq?
Baghdad, with 7,837,463 people in the city at the 2024 census and 9,780,429 in Baghdad governorate. It is close to six times the size of Mosul, the second city. Figures around 8 million that you will see quoted are 2025–2026 projections rather than the census count.
How many cities in Iraq are there?
There is no official list, because “city” is not a fixed administrative category in Iraq. The 2024 census recorded around 30 urban localities above 145,000 people and 19 governorates. For travel purposes the useful number is about eleven — the cities that are both worth visiting and realistically open.
Is Baghdad open to tourists?
Yes. Baghdad sits in the FCDO’s “all but essential travel” band rather than the stricter one, the airport is operating at around 90% of capacity, and independent travellers do visit. A driver or guide makes the day work far better than going it alone. Sadr City specifically remains under an “against all travel” advisory.
Can I visit Mosul?
Yes, in practice, as a guided day trip from Erbil, and al-Nuri mosque and the al-Hadba minaret have been open since September 2025. But Ninawa province is under an “against all travel” advisory, which will invalidate most travel insurance. That trade-off is real and you should make it deliberately.
Which of the cities in Iraq is safest for a first visit?
Erbil, by a clear margin — visa on arrival for many nationalities, a walkable centre, functioning tourist infrastructure and no permit requirements. That said, the entire Kurdistan Region carries an “all but essential travel” advisory, and drones were downed over Erbil in July 2026. Safest is not the same as safe.
Do I need a separate permit for Karbala or Najaf?
No. An ordinary Iraqi visa covers both, and there is no authorisation letter to obtain. Samarra is the genuine exception among commonly visited places, where the checkpoint process is involved and overnight stays by foreigners are not permitted.
Can I use one visa for Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq?
A federal Iraqi e-visa works everywhere including the Kurdistan Region. A Kurdistan Region visa does not work in federal Iraq — plan on that rule. Some operators claim it has been relaxed since January 2025, but no official Iraqi or KRG source confirms it and travellers have reported being turned back between Erbil and Mosul in 2026. Get the federal e-visa first if you want both.
Which city has the best food?
Baghdad for masgouf, the split grilled river carp cooked upright beside an open fire, which is the closest thing Iraq has to a national dish. Sulaymaniyah and Erbil for Kurdish cooking and better coffee. Basra for anything from the Gulf. There is a fuller treatment in the Iraqi food guide.
How much does it cost to travel between cities in Iraq?
Very little by international standards. A shared taxi or coaster between neighbouring cities runs from a few thousand dinars — Baghdad to Karbala from the Alawi garage is about 3,500 dinars — while a private car for the day is a different order of expense. Convert at the street rate of roughly 1,500 dinars to the dollar rather than the official peg of 1,320. The cost guide has the full breakdown.
Final thoughts
The gap between what the data says about the cities in Iraq and what the internet says about them is unusually wide, and it is worth understanding why. A country that had not counted itself since 1987 was described for thirty-six years in estimates, and those estimates hardened into facts through repetition. The 2024 census is the first chance in a generation to write about the cities in Iraq using real numbers, and most of page one has not updated yet.
The travel picture has moved just as fast in the opposite direction. Mosul’s minaret is standing again and half the internet says it is rubble; the Iraq Museum is shut and half the internet says it is open. What that should tell you is not that Iraq is unknowable, but that anything you read about it — including this — has a shelf life measured in months. Check the date on the page. Then check whether the airport is flying this week.
If you are still deciding whether any of this is for you, start with the pillar guide to the best places to visit in Iraq, which covers the sites as well as the cities, then read the honest assessment in is Iraq safe and the survey of the most beautiful places in the country. If you have already decided, where to stay and what a guided tour actually involves are the next two practical questions.
Photo credits
Baghdad and the Tigris from Al-Shohada Bridge — Samir Al-Ibrahem (CC BY-SA 4.0). Erbil Citadel — Abdulsalam Al Dabbagh (CC BY-SA 4.0). Sulaymaniyah in snow — Diyar Muhammed (CC BY-SA 4.0). Al-Hadba minaret, Mosul — الدبوني (CC BY-SA 4.0). Basra corniche on the Shatt al-Arab — Ali Maytham Nadhim (CC BY-SA 4.0). Karbala from the air — Karbobala Photos (CC BY 4.0). All images via Wikimedia Commons.
