Overview
Iraq holds a rank-91 passport reaching 31 destinations without a prior visa. Its population is around 45.5 million, the capital is Baghdad, and the currency is the Iraqi dinar (IQD).
Iraq has no citizenship-by-investment programme.
🔴 Many countries maintain travel advisories for Iraq, with markedly different levels by region. Check what is in force for the specific region you intend to visit, rather than relying on a single national generalisation.
But Iraq offers two things this library has not encountered elsewhere, and both repay reading.
✅ The only case: nationality stripped, then restored
Throughout this library I have recorded nine cases of people unable to prove nationality — Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine, North Korea. 🔴 None was definitively resolved.
📌 Iraq is the first and only case in this library showing that it CAN be repaired by legislation.
The background, stated as facts:
- During the 1970s and 1980s, the Iraqi authorities of the time stripped tens of thousands of people of Iraqi nationality, the most heavily affected known group being the Faili Kurds — a Shia Kurdish community long resident in the eastern border areas and in Baghdad.
- 🔴 Many were stripped of documents and deported to Iran, with property confiscated. A great many became stateless for decades — unrecognised by Iraq and without the host country's nationality.
📌 The Iraqi Nationality Law of 2006 — enacted after the new constitution — contains a rare provision: that persons stripped of Iraqi nationality under earlier decisions have that nationality restored, with a mechanism for re-registration.
🔴 For completeness, and this is the necessary honesty: restoration on paper does not automatically become documents in hand. Many had lost all original records, or have children and grandchildren born abroad with nothing to complete the chain of proof. Re-registration has run for years and not everyone has been able to complete it.
📌 But the lesson stands, and it is something this library needed:
Nine earlier articles show how easily nationality is lost. Iraq is the first showing it can also be given back — by a clause in a statute. 🔴 The same instrument that took it away can return it. What statute grants, statute can revise — recorded four times in this library at Micronesia, Samoa, Tonga and Turkmenistan. Iraq is that same principle running the other way.
✅ Two further points worth recording in the 2006 law
📌 1. Iraq permits dual citizenship. This distinguishes it from most countries in the region covered here — Iran does not recognise it, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan prohibit it. With a very large Iraqi community abroad, this has real significance.
📌 2. Iraqi women can transmit nationality to their children — the 2006 law provides that children of an Iraqi father or mother hold Iraqi nationality, subject to conditions on place of birth.
🔴 This is the second piece in the positive sequence on gender in nationality law, after Iran's 2019 amendment:
Negative consequences: Nepal · Lebanon · Afghanistan. ✅ Amended or different: Iran (2019) · Iraq (2006). 📌 Neighbouring countries, the same region as Lebanon, opposite rules. Once again: never infer nationality rules from one country to another.
🔴 Two entry regimes in one country
This is a practical detail few people know in advance, and it causes genuine trouble.
📌 The Kurdistan Region of Iraq is an autonomous region with its own government under the Iraqi constitution, seated in Erbil, with its own security forces and its own entry regime.
🔴 Concrete consequences:
- Nationals of certain countries may enter the Kurdistan Region under arrangements issued by the regional authorities, at Erbil or Sulaymaniyah airports.
- 🔴 But an entry permission issued by the regional authorities does not automatically allow onward travel to the rest of federal Iraq — and vice versa.
- Travel between the two generally requires documentation valid under both regimes.
📌 For readers of this site, the general lesson: "being admitted to a country" is not always a single concept. Some countries contain areas with their own entry regimes, and a visa for one is not usable in the other. Anyone planning travel must establish where their documents are valid, not merely whether they may enter the country at all.
📌 Where humanity wrote its first law
This is the most rewarding historical section, and it bears directly on this site's subject.
The land between the Tigris and Euphrates — Mesopotamia — is among the cradles of human civilisation.
📌 Things that originated here and that the world still uses:
- Writing. Sumerian cuneiform is among the earliest known writing systems, appearing around 3400–3000 BCE.
- Cities. Uruk was among humanity's first urban settlements.
- 🔴 Written law. The Code of Hammurabi, inscribed on a stone stele in the eighteenth century BCE, is among the earliest surviving complete written legal codes. The still earlier Code of Ur-Nammu preceded it.
- Base-60 counting — the reason an hour has 60 minutes and a circle 360 degrees.
- The wheel, large-scale irrigation, and the earliest systematically recorded astronomical observations.
📌 Why this belongs on a citizenship site: because the idea that relations between people, and between people and authority, must be written down, made public and applied in common — began here. The Hammurabi stele was erected in a public place so that anyone could read it.
🔴 This entire library is about documents, nationality laws and legal provisions. Four thousand years ago, in this very land, people first decided that law must be written down rather than held in a ruler's head. That is the starting point of everything this site discusses.
Geography & climate
Iraq borders Iran, Türkiye, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, with a very short coastline on the Persian Gulf.
Terrain: the alluvial plain between the two rivers in the centre and south, desert to the west, and mountains in the north and northeast within the Kurdistan Region.
🔴 The water crisis is Iraq's most serious structural problem, and it originates upstream. Both the Tigris and the Euphrates rise outside Iraq — chiefly in Türkiye, with tributaries from Iran. Upstream damming and abstraction substantially reduce the flow reaching Iraq.
📌 This is the fourth variant of the upstream–downstream problem this library tracks:
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan — upstream countries wanting winter releases for power. Laos — Mekong dams affecting Vietnam's Mekong Delta. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Iran — the Aral Sea and Lake Urmia lost to irrigation. Iraq — 🔴 at the tail of both rivers that gave the country its name. 📌 A country can owe its civilisation to two rivers and still not control their headwaters.
📌 The Mesopotamian Marshes in the south — traditional home of the Marsh Arabs — 🔴 were extensively drained in the 1990s, forcing most residents out. After 2003 parts were restored by breaching the drainage works, and the area was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2016. ✅ This is among the world's few examples of partially reversing a deliberate human-caused environmental disaster — in the same class as Kazakhstan's restoration of the North Aral.
🔴 Summer temperatures in southern Iraq are among the highest ever recorded on earth, and dust storms are increasingly frequent as soils dry and vegetation is lost.
Modern history — stated at the level of facts
- After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire the region came under British mandate, and the Kingdom of Iraq became independent in 1932.
- 1958 — the monarchy was overthrown and Iraq became a republic.
- 1968–2003 — the period of Baath party rule. 🔴 It encompassed the Iran–Iraq war of 1980–1988, the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the ensuing Gulf war, and international sanctions through the 1990s whose humanitarian effects were documented by many organisations.
- 🔴 The same period saw the Anfal campaign of the late 1980s directed against Kurdish communities, and the chemical weapons attack at Halabja in 1988. Several states and judicial bodies have recognised these events as genocide.
- 2003 — the US-led invasion; the previous government fell. 🔴 The following period involved prolonged conflict, sectarian violence and very heavy civilian losses.
- 2005 — a new constitution establishing a federal model and recognising the autonomy of the Kurdistan Region.
- 🔴 2014–2017 — the group calling itself Islamic State seized substantial territory. Millions were displaced. The Yazidi community in the Sinjar area suffered systematic violence that the United Nations and several states have recognised as genocide. Territorial liberation was substantially completed by the end of 2017.
- Since then: reconstruction, return of displaced people, and continuing problems of security, corruption and public services.
📌 This site states events with dates and delivers no political judgment.
Economy
1. Oil — and the dependence here is extreme. 📌 Iraq holds among the world's largest oil reserves and is among OPEC's largest producers.
🔴 But the notable figure is not output; it is share: oil accounts for the overwhelming majority of state budget revenue — at a level few countries anywhere match.
📌 This is the most extreme form of the resource paradox this library tracks:
Nauru · Venezuela — spent or misgoverned. Papua New Guinea · Mongolia — funds correctly designed but never filled. Turkmenistan · Afghanistan — reserves without a route to market. Iraq — 🔴 full reserves and a route to market, but almost no other revenue source at all. 🔴 The consequence: the state budget — and therefore the wages of a very large share of the workforce — moves with the world oil price. This is the structural risk from which every analysis of Iraq must start.
2. Agriculture. Dates — 📌 Iraq was once the world's leading date exporter — alongside wheat and barley. 🔴 Heavily affected by the water problem above.
3. Religion and pilgrimage. 📌 Najaf and Karbala are among the most important pilgrimage sites in Shia Islam, receiving millions of pilgrims annually — a genuine economic sector of very large scale, and one rarely mentioned outside the region.
🔴 A disadvantage to state: electricity infrastructure does not meet demand, making power cuts routine, especially in summer at extreme temperatures — with direct effects on all commercial activity.
As always: tax obligations here do not replace those in your country of residence.
Culture & people
Arabic and Kurdish are both constitutionally official — 📌 a rarity in the region. Turkmen, Syriac and other languages are recognised locally.
Society is religiously and ethnically diverse: Shia and Sunni Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, and the Assyrian and Chaldean Christian communities — 📌 among the oldest Christian communities in the world, still using a language descended from Aramaic — alongside Yazidi, Mandaean and Shabak communities.
🔴 Many of these minority communities have declined sharply through decades of conflict, a loss of cultural heritage no policy can restore.
The Vietnamese community in Iraq is very small, connected mainly to construction and oil projects in particular periods.
Immigration routes
No investment programme exchanging for citizenship.
Categories existing in law include employer-sponsored work permits — chiefly in oil and gas, construction, power and infrastructure — alongside investment visas, specialist visas and residence through marriage.
🔴 Repeating the point above: establish clearly whether your documents are valid in federal Iraq, in the Kurdistan Region, or in both.
Citizenship
- ✅ Dual citizenship permitted.
- ✅ Transmissible through both father and mother, subject to the 2006 law's conditions.
- ✅ A restoration mechanism exists for those stripped of nationality under earlier decisions — see the opening section.
- Naturalisation of foreigners exists in law with long residence requirements and case-by-case assessment.
🔴 If anyone offers you "Iraqi citizenship by investment", stop. No such programme exists. The restoration mechanism is a procedure for those who once held the right, not a product for sale.
Everyday life
🔴 Conditions vary greatly by region — the most important point in this section. The Kurdistan Region generally presents a different security and infrastructure environment from several other areas, and many countries' travel advisories reflect that difference.
Living costs: low relative to developed countries; Erbil and Baghdad differ.
Healthcare: the public system has been heavily affected by decades of conflict and sanctions. Private hospitals in the major cities serve foreigners; complex cases typically go to Türkiye, Jordan, Lebanon or India. International insurance with medical evacuation cover is mandatory.
Education: 📌 Iraq once had among the region's strongest education systems in the 1970s and 1980s, and traces of that legacy remain in some institutions. International schools operate in Erbil and Baghdad.
Connectivity: the international airports at Baghdad, Erbil, Basra and Najaf connect to the Gulf, Türkiye, Jordan, Iran and some European points.
🔴 Electricity: as noted, grid outages are routine and generators are a fixed cost to budget for.
Who should consider Iraq
It may fit if:
- You work in oil and gas, power, infrastructure construction or reconstruction with a specific contract — these have genuine demand.
- 🔴 You are of Iraqi origin and fall within the 2006 law's restoration provisions — enquire directly with the competent authorities, because this is a real entitlement.
- You research archaeology or ancient history — nowhere in the world has this density of sites.
Not a fit if:
- 🔴 You are offered "Iraqi citizenship by investment": no such programme exists.
- 🔴 You are planning without distinguishing between the regions — in security terms and in entry-regime terms alike.
- You need stable electricity infrastructure or specialist healthcare on the spot.
The point to carry away: this library has told nine stories about losing nationality, and none had an ending. Iraq is the tenth, and the first with a statutory clause stating that those from whom it was taken shall have it returned.
🔴 Implementing that clause is difficult and incomplete — but it exists. In a field where most news concerns rights being narrowed, recording one case running the other way is worth doing — not to gloss over anything, but to show that direction is a direction that can be travelled.