9-Day Iraq Group Tour » Babylon, Uruk, Ur, the Marshes, Hatra, Mosul & Erbil

Our representative meets you inside the terminal at Baghdad International and walks you through the visa-on-arrival desk — the part most travellers worry about, and the part we handle. From there it is a short drive into the city along the road that was once the most dangerous stretch of tarmac on Earth and is now simply a road. Iraq tends to reorder your expectations within the first hour. The rest of the evening is yours to sleep off the flight.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

A full day in a capital that was, for five hundred years, the richest and most learned city on the planet. You start at the Iraqi National Museum — Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian treasure across twenty galleries, including the Warka Vase and the Lady of Uruk, both looted in 2003 and both recovered. Then Mutanabbi Street, the booksellers' street named for a 10th-century poet, where the old saying still holds: Cairo writes, Beirut prints, Baghdad reads. You finish at the split blue dome of the Al-Shaheed Martyrs' Monument and at Firdos Square, where a statue came down in front of the world's cameras in 2003.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

South to Babylon — the Ishtar Gate, the Processional Way, the Lion of Babylon, Saddam's palace on its artificial hill — then out into the desert to the Abbasid fortress of Al-Ukhaidir, standing alone in the sand since around 775 AD. Continue to Karbala, arriving as the golden shrines light up for the evening.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

Karbala and Najaf in the morning — the shrines of Imam Hussein and Imam Ali, and Wadi al-Salam, the largest cemetery on Earth. Then Uruk, if the ground is dry enough to reach it: the first true city in human history, home of Gilgamesh, the place where writing was invented around 3200 BC. Nothing you will see is older or more important. On to the Great Ziggurat of Ur and Nasiriyah for the night.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

The Mesopotamian Marshes are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the largest wetland in the Middle East, and — by long tradition — the site of the Garden of Eden. The Ma'dan, the Marsh Arabs, have lived here for five thousand years in mudhifs: vaulted cathedral-like guest houses woven entirely from reeds, without a single nail. Saddam drained the marshes in the 1990s to punish the people living in them; after 2003 the dykes were broken and the water came back. You go out among the reeds in a mashuf, the long canoe of the marshes, with water buffalo swimming alongside. It is the strangest and most beautiful thing in Iraq.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

North to Samarra to climb the Malwiya, the anticlockwise spiral minaret of 851 AD. Then out into the desert to Hatra — a Parthian caravan city that twice broke Roman armies under its walls, its temples mixing Greek, Roman, Arab and Mesopotamian gods in a way that exists nowhere else. ISIS filmed themselves destroying it; most of it stood. Continue to Mosul for the night.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

The Assyrian walls and the winged-bull gates of Nineveh, capital of the empire that ruled the ancient Near East, sit directly across the Tigris from Mosul's Old City — which is still rising from the ruins of the 2017 battle. You walk both, then drive north into Kurdistan for the night in Duhok.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

Lalish, holiest site of the Yazidi faith — a green valley of conical spires where you walk barefoot. Then the Khinis reliefs, carved into a cliff face by Sennacherib around 690 BC to mark the canal he cut to water Nineveh, and Mar Mattai, a Syriac Orthodox monastery in continuous use since 363 AD. Through Akre and into Erbil for the evening.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

A final morning in Erbil and a private transfer to the airport for your flight home.