Last updated: August 2026. We re-checked the status of every museum listed here in August 2026, including the closure of the national museum in Baghdad, the Slemani Museum’s own published hours, and the new ticketed museum at the al-Nuri mosque in Mosul.
Start with the awkward part. The best known of the museums in Iraq — the Iraq Museum in Baghdad — has been closed to visitors since July 2025, and as of August 2026 no reopening has been announced. Almost every page you will find on this subject still lists it as open, prints opening hours for it, and in one case suggests buying a skip-the-line ticket. There is no ticket to skip. The gates are shut for a maintenance programme that was supposed to take 190 days and has now run past eighteen months. Museums slot into the broader route we lay out in the best places to visit in Iraq.
That single fact reorganises the whole subject. If you were planning a trip around Mesopotamian antiquities, the collection you most wanted to see is not currently available, and the museums that are open are mostly in the Kurdistan Region, plus one very good one in Basra. That is not a disaster — the Slemani Museum is the second largest in the country and holds objects the Baghdad collection would happily take — but it changes the shape of an itinerary, and nobody tells you.
What follows is a museum-by-museum account with the thing page one leaves out: how confident we are in each figure, and where it came from. Where we could not verify hours or a price, we say so rather than repeating a number that traces back to an aggregator. There is also a section on repatriation, which is the most interesting story in Iraqi museums right now and the one most closely tied to what you will eventually get to see. If you want the wider picture first, our guide to what there is to do across the country sets the museums against everything else competing for your days.
The short answer
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Is the Iraq Museum in Baghdad open? | No. Closed since July 2025 for maintenance. No confirmed reopening date. |
| Which is the best museum you can actually walk into? | The Slemani Museum in Sulaymaniyah, followed by the Basrah Museum. |
| What does a museum ticket cost? | Federal sites run about 25,000 IQD for foreigners, 3,000 IQD for Iraqis. Several Kurdistan museums are free. |
| Do you need a permit? | No. Your visa is enough. Professional or documentary filming needs written permission. |
| Can you take photographs inside? | Usually yes with a phone or stills camera; video is often restricted. Ask at the desk. |
One more thing before the detail: there is no published fee schedule for Iraqi museums or archaeological sites anywhere. Not on the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage site, not on any ministry page. Every price in this article is traveller-reported or operator-reported, and we have said which. Treat all of them as indicative and carry more cash than you think you need, because almost nothing in Iraq takes a card.
The Iraq Museum, Baghdad: closed, and worth understanding anyway
The Iraq Museum — often called the National Museum of Iraq, and signed simply “Iraq Museum” over the door — is the national collection. It began as a room of artefacts that Gertrude Bell started assembling in a government building in 1922 to stop foreign excavators shipping everything out; the Baghdad Antiquities Museum formally opened on 14 June 1926 with Bell as its first director. She died later the same year. The collection moved to its present 45,000-square-metre building in the Al-Salhiya area of Karkh in 1966 and took the name it uses now.
It holds around 28 galleries and vaults covering more than five thousand years: Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Hatran, Abbasid and Islamic material. The Nimrud gold, the Warka Vase, the Mask of Warka, the Lyres of Ur, the throne dais of Shalmaneser III. The labels are bilingual, a legacy of the museum’s British connections, though guides who have worked there say the labels are thin on history and the free in-house guides carry most of the value.
What the closure actually is
In July 2025 the museum shut for what the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage described as a 190-day maintenance and rehabilitation programme, upgrading display conditions, climate control, visitor facilities and presentation to what officials called international standards. In December 2025, SBAH’s head of maintenance and preservation, Mohammed al-Bayati, told the state newspaper al-Sabah that the project was 90 per cent complete and the museum would reopen in early 2026.
Early 2026 came and went. In February 2026 the Ministry of Culture was still describing the Iraqi Museum renovation as part of a forward plan rather than a finished job. We could find no announcement of a reopening, no reopening ceremony, and no first-hand account of anyone getting in, at any point up to August 2026. Do not build a day in Baghdad around this museum until you have confirmed with your guide, your hotel or the ministry that it has actually opened. If you are travelling with an operator, ask them to check the week before you fly, not the month before.
The pre-closure details, clearly labelled as pre-closure
These figures describe how the museum ran before July 2025. They are the best record of what a visit looked like and they are the numbers that will probably return, but none of them is currently in force.
- Hours (pre-closure, low confidence): Sunday to Thursday 09:00–14:00, Friday 09:00–16:00, closed Saturday. Reported by travellers rather than published by the museum.
- Entry (pre-closure, reasonable confidence): 25,000 IQD for foreigners, 3,000 IQD for Iraqis, with a student discount that certainly applied to Iraqi students and possibly to international ones. Several independent first-hand accounts agree on these two numbers.
- Payment: card only at the ticket booth, which is unusual in Iraq and caught people out.
- Location: the Allawi district of Baghdad. Saying muthaf (متحف) to a taxi driver was enough to get there.
- Security: soldiers on the gate, a reception and search area inside with a separate curtained section for women, bag lockers past the scanner. Laptops were sometimes left at reception.
- Guides: free, several with good English, no tip expected or encouraged.
- Photography: phones and stills cameras allowed; filming was not, and required separate permission.
The Assyrian and Hatra halls are the ones people remember. Allow two to three hours; the building is larger and more tiring than it looks from the garden.
The bitter part
On 6 March 2025, Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani opened a new exhibition of recovered artefacts at the Iraq Museum: more than six thousand tablets, clay cones, cylinder seals, Mandaean scrolls and ivories from Ur, most of them repatriated after decades abroad. It was the culmination of twenty years of legal and diplomatic work. Four months later the museum closed. The galleries built to display Iraq’s returned heritage have been seen by very few people.
Which museums in Iraq are actually open
The table below is our best reading as of August 2026. The confidence column is the point of it. “Good” means at least two independent sources or a primary one; “low” means a single unverified report; “none” means we could not stand it up at all and neither should anyone else.
| Museum | City | Open? | Hours | Entry | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Iraq Museum | Baghdad | No | — | Was 25,000 / 3,000 IQD | Closure: good. Hours: low |
| Slemani Museum | Sulaymaniyah | Yes | Sun–Thu 09:00–13:00 | Free | Good (museum’s own site) |
| Amna Suraka | Sulaymaniyah | Yes | Six days a week, split shift, closed Fri | Free | Good on free; moderate on hours |
| Erbil Civilization Museum | Erbil | Yes | Mon–Thu 09:00–13:00 (reported) | Free (reported) | Moderate; hours are erratic |
| Kurdish Textile Museum | Erbil Citadel | Yes | ~09:00–18:00, closed Fri | ~1,000–1,500 IQD | Moderate |
| Basrah Museum | Basra | Yes | Unconfirmed; weekend closures reported | 25,000 / 3,000 IQD reported | Open: good. Hours: low |
| Halabja Monument | Halabja | Yes | Unconfirmed | Commonly reported free | Open: good. Fee: low |
| Mosul Museum | Mosul | No | — | — | Good |
The Kurdistan Region: where the doors are open
If your interest is museums rather than sites, the Kurdistan Region is currently the more rewarding half of the country, which is not a sentence anyone would have written five years ago. Note that the FCDO advises against all but essential travel to the whole region, and that this has practical consequences for insurance rather than being a description of the streets.
Slemani Museum, Sulaymaniyah
The second largest museum in Iraq and, at the moment, the best one you can walk into. It opened on 14 July 1961 and moved into its present 6,000-square-metre single-storey building on Salim Street in 1980. The collection runs from Palaeolithic hand axes through Jarmo pottery — Jarmo being one of the earliest farming villages anywhere — to Assyrian, Sassanian and Islamic material.
Two things make it more than a regional collection. The first is the Paikuli gallery, opened in stages from 2019 with Sapienza University of Rome: the inscribed blocks and the carved busts of the Sassanian king Narseh from the Paikuli tower, dated around 293 CE, displayed publicly for the first time. The second is Tablet V of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a newly recovered Old Babylonian fragment that added around twenty previously unknown lines to the poem. The museum also has form for buying looted artefacts back off the market to keep them in the country, a practice that is genuinely controversial and that the museum does not hide.
The museum’s own website states free entry, open 09:00–13:00, Sunday to Thursday. We are treating that as the best available figure because it is the institution’s own. Other listings circulate a Saturday-to-Thursday window closing at 15:00; if you have a flexible morning, arrive at nine and you are covered either way. There is a dedicated children’s hall, the first purpose-built one in Iraq, opened in 2019.
Amna Suraka, Sulaymaniyah
Amna Suraka — “Red Security” — was the northern headquarters of Saddam Hussein’s General Security Directorate from the mid-1980s until 1991. The building was designed in East Germany; Sulaymaniyah was the first Iraqi province to get one, and the project was built in secret under cover of being an agriculture directorate. People worked out what it was when it was finished, and named it after the reddish colour of the walls. Students, Kurdish nationalists, Arabs and Christians were held, interrogated, tortured and raped inside it.
In March 1991, during the uprising, Peshmerga took the compound after a two-hour assault. The bullet scars across the facade are from that fight and have deliberately never been repaired. Captured Iraqi army vehicles and artillery still sit in the yard. The museum opened in 2003.
It is a hard visit and should be. The Hall of Mirrors holds 182,000 shards of glass, one for each Kurd estimated killed in the Anfal campaign, lit by 4,500 small lights for the villages destroyed. Elsewhere there are mannequin reconstructions of torture, photographs of exhumed bodies, and prisoners’ names and poems scratched into the cell walls so that whoever came next would know others had been there. A later hall covers Peshmerga killed fighting ISIS. It is worth knowing going in that the museum tells this history inside a frame of Kurdish national identity, and that scholars have written about it in exactly those terms.
Entry is free. It is closed on Fridays and runs a split shift, commonly reported as roughly 09:00–12:00 and 14:00–16:00. Do not take children who are not ready for it. Of all the museums in Iraq this is the one people write home about, and it is not because of the objects.
Erbil Civilization Museum
Erbil’s archaeological museum is the second largest in the Kurdistan Region. It started in the 1960s in the Minarah district, moved into the citadel in the mid-1970s, and has occupied its current building near the Qalinj Agha tell since 1989. Three halls: prehistory to the early second millennium BCE, then Urartian, Hurrian, Assyrian, Seleucid and Hatran material, then Sassanian and Islamic. It has no Neo-Babylonian holdings, which is a slightly odd gap and worth knowing before you go looking.
Much of its documentation was lost during the 1991 uprising and the mid-1990s Kurdish civil war, so provenance information for a lot of the collection simply does not exist. Reported hours are Monday to Thursday 09:00–13:00 with free entry, but travellers describe the opening pattern as unreliable in practice. Ask your hotel to phone ahead.
Kurdish Textile Museum, Erbil Citadel
Established in 2004 in a restored mansion in the south-east quarter of the citadel, this is a small, well-kept collection of Kurdish rugs, kilims, costume, tribal caps and jewellery, run partly as a working project to keep traditional weaving techniques alive. It is the most enjoyable half-hour in Erbil for anyone who finds pottery sherds hard going, and the building itself is a decent argument for the citadel restoration.
Reported hours are around 09:00 to 18:00 daily except Friday, with entry somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 IQD. The bigger question is the citadel. Erbil Citadel is one of Iraq’s six inscribed World Heritage properties, and since May 2025 public access has been partial and scheduled rather than free-flow, with most of the back lanes fenced off while restoration continues. A four-year, US$10 million UNESCO revitalisation programme was signed in October 2025. Which days the citadel is open in any given week is not something we could confirm from outside the country — check locally the day before.
Halabja Monument and Peace Museum
The memorial to the chemical attack of 16 March 1988, in the town it happened to. It combines a monument, a museum of photographs and personal effects, and a memorial to the named dead. Halabja became Iraq’s nineteenth governorate in April 2025 and the KRG approved roughly 600 million IQD in 2025 to renovate and expand the site, so expect building work and possible partial closures. Entry is commonly reported as free; we could not confirm that from an official source. Like Amna Suraka, this is a memorial before it is an attraction, and the town is not a backdrop.
Basrah Museum: four galleries in a palace
The Basrah Museum sits on the bank of the Shatt al-Arab about three kilometres south-east of the old city centre, in a former palace of Saddam Hussein. The original city museum was looted in 1991, one of nine museums stripped in the chaos at the end of the first Gulf War; the palace was later occupied by the British Army, then used as a base by Iraqi and US forces. The rebuilt museum opened its first gallery in September 2016 and opened properly in March 2019.
Four galleries across 2,500 square metres of Ottoman-style architecture, complete with Basrawi shanasheel woodwork and a painted domed foyer. The Sumer gallery runs from Halaf-culture material around 5500 BCE to the Third Dynasty of Ur; the Babylon gallery leans Kassite; the Assyrian gallery is mostly Neo-Assyrian, ninth to eighth century BCE; and the Basrah gallery is Islamic-period pottery, glass, terracotta and a large coin collection, including pieces recovered from the 1991 looting. Outside there are two reed mudhif guesthouses and a set of traditional marsh boats, which is a good primer if you are heading on to the marshes.
Over 2,500 objects are on display. The project was driven for years by Qahtan al-Abeed of the Basrah Antiquities and Heritage directorate with the Friends of Basrah Museum, the British Museum and the UK Cultural Protection Fund. Entry is reported at the usual 25,000 / 3,000 IQD split. We could not confirm current opening hours and there is a history of weekend closures, so this is another one to check the day before rather than turning up. Basra sits at the head of the southern circuit, so most people fold it into a longer run through Ur, the marshes and Nasiriyah.
Mosul: one museum that has not reopened, and one that has
The Mosul Museum opened in 1952 and moved into its present building in 1972. It was the second largest in the country. It closed in 2003 when the war began and part of the collection was evacuated to Baghdad; the monumental pieces that could not be moved stayed. In February 2015 ISIS filmed the destruction of what remained — the colossal Nimrud lion, lamassu figures, the throne base of Ashurnasirpal II — and burned 28,000 rare books and manuscripts from the city’s libraries.
Since 2018 the museum has been the subject of an unusual international rehabilitation consortium: ALIPH funding, with the Musée du Louvre, the Smithsonian Institution and the World Monuments Fund working alongside SBAH and the museum’s own staff. ALIPH’s project page, read in August 2026, lists the grant total at US$17,159,929 across 2018–2026 and the project status as ongoing. Restorers have had to sort, clean and document rubble before any conservation could start. It is a genuinely remarkable piece of work.
It has not reopened. The current line is a full reopening in autumn 2026. Treat that with care: the same autumn-2026 date has been circulating in the press since May 2023, when the launch of the final rehabilitation phase was marked with an exhibition in the museum’s restored Royal Hall. That exhibition was not a reopening, and a 2020 prime-ministerial visit to the building was not one either, though both are cited as if they were. If it does open this autumn it will be one of the more moving museum openings anywhere; we are simply not going to promise you a date.
The al-Nuri Grand Mosque Museum, which is open
Here is the thing no competing page seems to have picked up. On 9 February 2026 the Nineveh Directorate of Antiquities and Heritage opened the al-Nuri Grand Mosque Museum and the mosque’s original prayer hall to visitors, as part of the Old City revival programme. Its director, Ruwaid al-Layla, gave Shafaq News the specifics: 25,000 IQD for foreigners, 3,000 IQD for Iraqis, open daily 10:00 to 17:00.
The draw is four underground rooms found during reconstruction, believed to be twelfth-century Atabeg-period ablution facilities, along with pottery and carved stone recovered nearby; they have been built into the new design. The mosque itself was founded by Nur al-Din Zangi in 1172, was where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the ISIS caliphate in June 2014, and was destroyed along with the al-Hadba minaret in June 2017. Both were reopened on 1 September 2025 after a UNESCO-led programme funded by the UAE, with the minaret rebuilt using around 26,000 of its original bricks.
The serious caveat: Nineveh province is one of the areas the FCDO advises against all travel to, which invalidates most travel insurance, and Mosul is realistically a guided day trip from Erbil rather than an independent stop. Read the current picture on security in Mosul before you decide, and read your policy wording.
Baghdad’s other museums, and one we could not verify
With the national collection shut, Baghdad still has a few things worth an hour.
The Baghdadi Museum, established in 1970 in an 1869 building on the Rusafa side near the Tigris, is a folk-life museum: 385 life-size figures arranged into 77 scenes of old Baghdad — crafts, trades, a wedding zaffa, maqam musicians, tea gatherings, a mother giving her newly married son an earful. It was damaged in 2003 and reopened in August 2008. It appears on current Old Baghdad walking itineraries, so it is believed open, but we could not confirm hours or a price. It is also the closest thing to a museum of everyday Iraqi custom and manners anywhere in the country.
The Abbasid Palace on the riverfront is a thirteenth-century building with a spectacular muqarnas iwan, usually run as a monument rather than a museum. Also believed open, also unconfirmed on hours and entry.
The National Museum of Modern Art is where we have to be blunt. A tidy “Saturday to Thursday, 09:00 to 17:00” is quoted for it across the web. We traced that string back to an AI-generated content farm and could not find it on any Iraqi source, any embassy page, or any dated first-hand account. We are not going to launder it by repeating it. The museum holds an important collection of twentieth-century Iraqi art — the Baghdad Modern Art Group, Jewad Selim’s circle, work that matters far beyond Iraq — and much of it was looted in 2003 and never recovered. Whether you can currently walk in, and when, is something we could not establish. If you want to see modern Iraqi art with more certainty, the commercial and non-profit galleries around Karrada and the Ruya Foundation’s activity are a better bet, and any decent Baghdad guide will know what is open that week.
The repatriation story, which is the real headline
The reason Iraqi museums are gaining objects rather than losing them is a twenty-year legal grind conducted mostly in New York, Washington, Rome and Beirut. Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, a US Marine and Manhattan assistant district attorney, led the original investigation into the 2003 looting and had recovered roughly 10,000 artefacts by 2006; his office is still returning material two decades later. In March 2025 the head of SBAH, Ali Obaid Shalgham, put the total returned to the Iraq Museum at 27,000 objects.
| Date | Return | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 2021 | 17,321 objects from the US | Largest repatriation in Iraq’s history; mostly from the Museum of the Bible collection |
| Sep–Dec 2021 | Gilgamesh Dream Tablet | Forfeited July 2021, handed over at the Smithsonian 23 September, received in Baghdad 7 December |
| Feb 2022 | 337 pieces from Lebanon | Seized from a private collection in Beirut |
| 2023–2024 | Returns from Italy and Switzerland | Including an FBI return in March 2023 of an ivory and gold-leaf furniture piece |
| 11 Feb 2025 | 27 artefacts plus 20 Sassanian coins | From Japan and Switzerland, handed over at an Iraq Museum ceremony |
| 6 Mar 2025 | Recovered-artefacts exhibition opens | 6,000+ tablets, cones, seals, Mandaean scrolls, Ur ivories |
| May 2025 | Manhattan DA return | One of a continuing series from the same office |
| 8 Jul 2026 | 9 antiquities from Manhattan DA | Including Sumerian worshipper figures, c. 2750–2600 BCE |
The Gilgamesh Dream Tablet is the one people ask about. It is a fragment of Tablet V of the epic, carrying the passage where Gilgamesh describes his dreams to Enkidu, and it was smuggled out of Iraq, sold with a fabricated provenance and bought by Hobby Lobby for the Museum of the Bible for around $1.6 million before US authorities seized and forfeited it. It was displayed at a ceremony in Baghdad in December 2021. Whether it is currently on permanent public display is something we could not confirm, and with the museum closed the question is academic for now. Do not plan a trip around seeing it.
A separate strand worth watching: the Al-Anbar Cultural Museum in Ramadi has been preparing to reopen with 530 artefacts returning from storage in Baghdad, many from the 7,000-year-old site of Eita near Hit. That was the position in June 2026. Anbar is not somewhere we would send an independent traveller, but it is a sign of where the antiquities are moving. Baghdad has also announced a new Grand Museum in the Green Zone, agreed in December 2025 and intended to be the country’s second largest — construction, not a visitable building.
What it costs, and where those numbers come from
The de facto standard at federal sites and museums is 25,000 IQD for foreigners against about 3,000 IQD for Iraqis. Two entirely separate research paths land on that split, and it is confirmed on the record for the new al-Nuri mosque museum in Mosul. At the street rate of roughly 1,500 dinars to the dollar in August 2026 — not the official 1,320 peg, which you will not get — that is around US$16 to US$17. Kurdistan is cheaper or free: Slemani and Amna Suraka charge nothing, the textile museum a token amount.
Two practical warnings. First, at some sites you pay past the checkpoint and no ticket is issued; your passport may be photographed instead. That is normal and not a scam. Second, several of the sites that publish confident entry fees for Iraqi museums are AI-generated aggregators that contradict themselves within a single page. If a figure appears with no date and no source, it is probably invented. We would rather tell you a price is unconfirmed than give you a number to argue about at a gate. Against the rest of a trip, museums in Iraq are a rounding error — a full day of them costs less than one taxi across Baghdad — so this is a section about avoiding embarrassment at a ticket window rather than about saving money.
Practical notes for a museum-led trip
Photography
Ordinary tourist photography at ticketed sites and museums is covered by your ticket; no separate permit is needed and no separate camera fee is documented at Babylon, Ur or Erbil Citadel. Professional or documentary shooting is different and requires SBAH permission and supervision. Inside museums, phones and stills cameras are usually fine and video usually is not — ask at the desk rather than assuming.
You will see a line quoted everywhere claiming the FCDO says it is illegal to photograph government buildings, checkpoints, military bases and embassies. That sentence is not on the current FCDO Iraq page, which we read in full. It appears to come from an older edition or from Australia’s advice. The underlying practice still holds and you should follow it: never point a camera at a checkpoint, a base, security personnel, a bridge or a government building, because it gets read as espionage and the consequences are real. Present it to yourself as prudence, not as a law you can look up. Drones are a separate matter: officially unregulated, in practice confiscated at customs including at Erbil. Leave it at home.
Getting between them
The museums that are open are spread across three cities that do not sit on a neat loop. Sulaymaniyah and Erbil are a comfortable pairing, three to four hours apart by road. Basra is a flight or a long drive from anywhere. Baghdad is the hinge, and until the national museum reopens it is a weaker museum stop than it should be. Our notes on moving between Iraqi cities cover the road and air options, and what actually happens at checkpoints is worth reading if you are driving.
When to go
Museums are one of the few things in Iraq you can do comfortably in high summer, since they are indoors and air-conditioned. Even so, mid-June to mid-August regularly tops 50°C — Karbala and Najaf both hit 50°C on 12 August 2026 — and moving between buildings in that is unpleasant and occasionally dangerous. October to April is easier for everything else you would combine them with. See the seasonal breakdown for the detail.
Guides
Take one. Labels in museums in Iraq are thin, English signage is inconsistent, and the free in-house guides at the national museum were the single best thing about visiting it. If you are on a group trip, the operators running Iraq almost all include the open museums as standard and will know that week’s opening pattern, which is worth more than any published timetable in this country.
Frequently asked questions
Is the National Museum of Iraq open in 2026?
No. It closed in July 2025 for a maintenance programme and had not reopened as of August 2026. Officials said in December 2025 that the work was 90 per cent complete and the museum would reopen in early 2026, but no reopening was announced. Check locally before building a day around it.
How many museums are there in Iraq?
There is no authoritative count of museums in Iraq. Wikipedia lists around eighteen notable ones; directory sites list eight to twelve. In practice the number a visitor can reliably get into today is closer to seven or eight, concentrated in Sulaymaniyah, Erbil, Basra and Halabja.
What is the best museum in Iraq?
On collection quality alone the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, when it reopens. Of the museums you can visit right now, the Slemani Museum in Sulaymaniyah, for the Paikuli gallery, the Gilgamesh Tablet V fragment and the prehistoric halls. The Basrah Museum is the best-presented.
Do I need a permit to visit museums in Iraq?
No. Your Iraqi visa is sufficient for museums and for ticketed archaeological sites. Permits only come into it for professional filming, and for a handful of sites such as Hatra where access is controlled for security reasons rather than heritage ones.
Can non-Muslims visit museums attached to religious sites?
The new museum at the al-Nuri mosque in Mosul is ticketed and open to foreign visitors at a published price, so yes there. Access to active shrines is a separate and more contested question, decided in practice by dress and by the officer on the gate rather than by any published policy.
Is it safe to visit museums in Iraq?
The museums themselves are among the most heavily guarded buildings in the country. The risk is in the journey and the region, not the gallery. Western governments still advise against travel to much of Iraq — the FCDO regionally, the US State Department at Level 4 for the whole country — and travelling against that advice generally invalidates your insurance. Our guide to what the advisories actually say sets out the detail.
What happened to the artefacts looted in 2003?
Around 15,000 objects were taken from the Iraq Museum itself in April 2003, and far more from unguarded archaeological sites in the years that followed — plausible estimates run to hundreds of thousands. Roughly 27,000 objects had been returned to the museum by March 2025, and returns continue, the most recent traced for this article being nine antiquities handed over by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office on 8 July 2026.
Can I take antiquities home as souvenirs?
No, and this is not a technicality. Removing any object from an Iraqi archaeological site has resulted in imprisonment, including a 2022 case involving foreign visitors. Do not pick up a potsherd at Babylon or Ur. Buying “antiquities” in a market is worse. The laws visitors most often fall foul of are worth ten minutes before you fly.
Final thoughts
Iraq recorded around 556 European and American tourists in 2024, in a country with something like 150,000 archaeological sites. Those two numbers explain the state of the museum sector better than any critique could. There is not enough visitor revenue to justify a published fee schedule, a working website or a phone line that answers, so the information vacuum gets filled by aggregators inventing hours for buildings they have never seen. The honest response is to say what is verified, say what is not, and check again before you go.
The compensation is that when you do get inside one of these places you will often have it close to yourself, and someone who works there will want to show you around. That is a rarer experience than a good collection. It is also fragile: the moment the national museum reopens and the Mosul galleries follow, the calculus changes, and a lot of the objects now sitting in crates will be back on the floor where their excavators intended them to be.
If you are shaping a route, our overview of the best places to visit in Iraq puts these museums in context alongside the sites they came out of, and the Mesopotamian background makes the galleries read very differently. For the cities where most of this is concentrated, start with Baghdad and the wider list of Iraqi cities worth your time, and if you would rather be outside for most of it, the country’s most striking landscapes and buildings will fill the gap easily.
Photo credits
Iraq Museum exterior and Assyrian gallery, and the Slemani Museum entrance: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Amna Suraka, Sulaymaniyah: Levi Clancy, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Basrah Museum entrance dome: Clemens Schmillen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Kurdish Textile Museum, Erbil: Adam Jones, Ph.D., CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
