UNESCO Sites in Iraq

After two days on a bus from Istanbul, I finally arrived in Erbil. It was 2009, and my first visit to Iraq.

One of the places I went to see was the Citadel, the enormous fortified settlement rising above the centre of the city.

It did not look like the Erbil Citadel visitors see today.

There were no polished tourism intentions in what I experienced. Parts felt almost like a military outpost. The place was impressive, but rough and quiet.

I came back years later and found a different Citadel.

That first visit was also the beginning of something that eventually connected many of my trips through Iraq.

I love history. To be honest, history was one of the main reasons I started traveling in the first place.

And Iraq is difficult to beat for that.

Today the country has six properties on UNESCO's World Heritage List and fifteen more on the Tentative List. The six inscribed properties are Ashur, Babylon, Erbil Citadel, Hatra, Samarra Archaeological City and the Ahwar of Southern Iraq. The Ahwar is the only mixed cultural and natural property among them.

Iraq UNESCO World Heritage List

1. Ashur (Qal'at Sherqat)
2. Babylon
3. Erbil Citadel
4. Hatra
5. Samarra Archaeological City
6. The Ahwar of Southern Iraq: Refuge of Biodiversity and the Relict Landscape of the Mesopotamian Cities

Iraq Tentative List

1. Nimrud
2. The Ancient City of Nineveh
3. The Fortress of Al-Ukhaidar
4. Wasit
5. The Site of Thilkifl
6. Wadi Al-Salam Cemetery in Najaf
7. Amedy city
8. Historical Features of the Tigris River in Baghdad Rusafa
9. Bestansur Neolithic settlement
10. Nippur
11. Old City of Mosul
12. Lalish Temple
13. Kirkuk Citadel
14. The Hajj Pilgrimage Routes: The Darb Zubaydah
15. Archaeological Site of Aqar Quf (ancient Dur-Kurigalzu)

The fifteenth entry, Aqar Quf, was added in 2025, which is why older versions of this page showed only fourteen tentative sites.

Amedi — a town built on a plateau

My 2009 trip also took me north into the mountains.

In Amedi I stayed with a local family for two nights.

Amedi is built on top of a high limestone plateau, with steep sides dropping toward the surrounding mountains. Standing at the old gate, you understand immediately why the location itself became part of the town's defence.

UNESCO's tentative listing specifically highlights this hilltop position, the surviving Mosul Gate and minaret, and the dramatic relationship between the town and the surrounding mountains.

The family I stayed with later took me into another part of their life.

I ended up going to a wedding of their relatives in Dohuk.

I had arrived because I wanted to explore an old mountain town. Two days later I was at a family wedding.

That is a better memory of Amedi for me than simply ticking another historical place from a list.

Babylon — a dream since art-history class

In 2016, I finally reached Babylon — the blue gate at the top of this page.

This one went much further back for me.

I had dreamed about seeing Babylon since high school, when I first encountered it in art-history classes.

Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar. The gates. The walls. Ancient Mesopotamia.

These were things that existed in schoolbooks long before Iraq existed in my own travel plans.

Then suddenly I was standing there.

What made the visit particularly good was having a guide.

He didn't just walk us between monuments. He stopped at walls, pointed directly at the masonry and explained what we were looking at.

I remember the walls particularly well. The layers. The brick. Trying to connect the physical remains in front of me with the Babylon I had studied years earlier.

Babylon was the centre of successive empires and reached one of its great periods under the Neo-Babylonian rulers, particularly Nebuchadnezzar II. UNESCO describes the surviving archaeological landscape as containing city walls, gates, temples and other remains of that imperial capital.

There is also something curious about the date of my visit.

I was there in 2016. Babylon did not become a UNESCO World Heritage property until 2019.

For me it had already been on the list for years. My own list.

The Mesopotamian Marshes

That same year I had one of my strongest experiences anywhere in Iraq.

I went into the Mesopotamian Marshes.

This was different from visiting ruins.

We traveled by a small narrow boat through the reeds and water until we reached a local family living on what felt like a small island inside the wetlands.

Their house and shelters were built among reeds. Water surrounded the settlement. Clothes hung outside.

There were no streets leading there. The boat was the connection.

I went inside, sat with the family and drank coffee.

This was basically my anthropology dream coming true.

The Ahwar are unusual even within the UNESCO system because the World Heritage property combines four wetland areas with three archaeological components — Uruk, Ur and Eridu. The same southern Mesopotamian landscape therefore contains both living wetlands and the remains of some of the ancient urban centres that developed around earlier marsh environments.

Reed architecture is not simply a decorative local style here. Reeds are the material the landscape provides. They can become walls, roofing, shelters and the great arched gathering structures associated with the marsh communities. UNESCO separately recognizes the traditional craft skills of Al-Mudhif construction as intangible cultural heritage connected to the Ahwar.

I had come because of the landscape and history.

What I remember is sitting with a family drinking coffee.

Al-Ukhaidar — and lunch inside a fortress

Another Iraqi site that completely worked for me was the Fortress of Al-Ukhaidar.

The scale is difficult to understand until you are inside.

Thick outer walls surround courtyards, halls and repeated arches. Round towers reinforce sections of the structure.

Al-Ukhaidar was built as a major early Islamic fortified complex on a route used by travelers and caravans. The tentative-list description gives dimensions of roughly 176 by 146 metres and identifies halls, an iwan, reception spaces and service areas within the enclosure.

But one of my favourite photographs has almost nothing to do with military architecture.

I looked down from the walls and there was a large group of local people having lunch.

They had spread a long cloth on the ground. Everybody was sitting around it. Plates and food filled the centre. Shoes were scattered all around the outside of the carpet.

Thousands of people have passed through this fortress for completely different reasons over the centuries.

That afternoon, part of it was simply a good place for lunch.

Ezekiel's Tomb and Hebrew writing in Iraq

At Al-Kifl I visited the site known as the Tomb of Ezekiel, or the Site of Thilkifl.

From outside, the historic complex sits inside the town rather than apart from it.

Old walls run beside motorcycles, bicycles, shops and people walking through the street.

Then I went inside.

This stopped me.

Hebrew. In Iraq.

Large bands of Hebrew writing remain visible among painted floral decoration and architectural ornament.

It was a physical reminder of a part of Iraqi history that can easily disappear from the way the country is presented today.

The shrine is associated with the prophet Ezekiel, called Thilkifl in the site's Islamic tradition. Iraq's UNESCO tentative-list submission describes it as sacred to both Jewish and Muslim communities and identifies the complex as a place where those histories became physically intertwined.

You don't need a history book at that moment.

The writing is still on the wall.

Wadi Al-Salam — a sea of tombs

In Najaf I saw a completely different landscape.

A sea of tombs.

That is still the simplest way I can describe it.

Graves, small enclosures, brick structures and tomb markers extend in every direction. From above there seems to be almost no space between them.

Wadi Al-Salam is on Iraq's UNESCO Tentative List, whose nomination describes it as one of the world's largest cemeteries and a burial place whose religious use has continued for many centuries.

But statistics don't really explain the place. The photograph does a better job.

Baghdad along the Tigris

I also visited the historic sites along the Tigris in Baghdad's Rusafa district.

The UNESCO tentative property stretches through an area including Al-Mustansiriya and the Abbasid Palace.

What I like about this part of Baghdad is that the history is not sitting alone inside an archaeological field.

It belongs to the city. The river is still there. Traffic and people are around it. Buildings from different periods sit inside modern Baghdad.

The tentative-list proposal specifically links this stretch of the Tigris with surviving architecture from the Abbasid and later periods.

Back to Erbil in 2018

I returned to Erbil again in 2018 during my one-month van journey around Iraq.

The Citadel I had seen on my first visit was changing.

There was much more conservation. Museums. Shops. A clearer intention to receive visitors.

Erbil Citadel had meanwhile been added to the World Heritage List in 2014. UNESCO describes it as a fortified settlement built on an archaeological tell — a hill created by generations of rebuilding in the same place — with its continuous ring of tall façades giving it the appearance of a fortress above modern Erbil.

Seeing the same place years apart was almost as interesting as seeing another site.

The monument hadn't moved. The way people used it had.

Lalish

I also reached Lalish.

And here I was lucky. I had a private visit with a local religious figure.

The photograph shows all of us barefoot outside the carved stone entrance.

That detail takes me straight back there.

Shoes off. Stone under the feet. Quiet courtyard. The man in white beside us.

Lalish is the central sanctuary of the Yazidi religion and contains the tomb of Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir. Its distinctive conical sacred architecture and role as a living pilgrimage centre are central to Iraq's tentative nomination of the site.

It wasn't an archaeological ruin that had stopped functioning. It was still a religious place.

That distinction matters when you are visiting.

Mosul

Then there was the Old City of Mosul.

I have already written separately about what I saw there after the battle, and I don't want to duplicate that story here.

Mosul entered Iraq's Tentative List in 2018.

My experience belongs on the Mosul page because it was much bigger than a UNESCO stop. The destruction of the Old City needed its own story.

Why these places keep pulling me back

Iraq is one of those countries where my old interest in history and my interest in people constantly overlap.

Babylon gave me the place I had been waiting to see since school. Erbil gave me the chance to see the same monument in two very different periods. Amedi turned into two nights with a family and then a wedding. At Al-Ukhaidar, people were having lunch below the fortress walls. At Ezekiel's Tomb, Hebrew letters survived inside an Iraqi shrine. At Lalish, I walked barefoot with a local priest.

And in the marshes, history stopped being the main subject completely.

I was sitting in a small boat between the reeds. Ahead was a family home surrounded by water.

Then we went inside for coffee.

Next door, I did the same exercise for Syria: all six UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Syria, visited across three trips.