Iraq [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION 'Where will you start your book on Iraq?' a friend asked me. But it is not difficult to decide where to begin. It may be unadventurous to work from the capital outwards; yet, undoubtedly, Baghdad must come first. Your aeroplane lands you there; Baghdad has the only international airport in Iraq. It is by far the largest city in the country and its name is one of the best known in any schoolboy's atlas — Baghdad of the Thousand and One Nights and Harun al Rashid. The city is the hub of Iraq, all roads and rivers converge there, government is carried on there, it is the place most young Iraqis yearn to live and work in — though that is a pity and a problem for Baghdad's planners. Baghdad is the best place from which to explore Iraq, and that is where the book starts. But first it should be said that this is not a political book, and it has little or nothing to say about oil, industrial production or economic development, except in passing. It is about the landscape of Iraq — I try to describe what any traveller may expect to see as he moves about Iraq and to explain more or less what it means and why it is there. My intention in writing this book was not to provide a meticulously detailed guidebook, a sort of Guide Bleu made beautiful by Nik Wheeler's photographs. There are no bus or train schedules in the pages that follow. Museum opening-times change and hotel prices, even names of hotels, are not constant. I have tried to give an impression of this unusual country of twin rivers, with its snowy north and lush, hot-house south, and some idea of the charm and diversity of the people who live there. That, I think, is more important than trying to pin down the departure time of the Baghdad-Mosul Express: