Baghdad, Mosul & Central Iraq

The land between the Tigris and Euphrates here held some of the great capitals of antiquity. Babylon, on the Euphrates, rose under Hammurabi in the 18th century BC and again under Nebuchadnezzar II in the 6th, whose walls, Ishtar Gate and hanging gardens made it a legend. To the north, Assur on the Tigris gave its name to the Assyrians, whose kings ruled from Nimrud and then Nineveh, opposite modern Mosul, until the Babylonians and Medes destroyed it in 612 BC. The Parthian and Sasanian empires ruled from Ctesiphon, south of Baghdad, and Hatra flourished as a desert caravan city.

After the Arab conquest, Kufa, in today's Najaf province, was an early capital, and the battle of Karbala in 680, where Imam Hussein was killed, founded Shia Islam's great act of mourning. In 762 the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur built the Round City of Baghdad on the Tigris, and the caliphs moved to Samarra from 836 to 892. The Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258 ended the golden age, and after centuries of Persian and Ottoman rivalry, the Ottomans governed from Baghdad and Mosul.

In the modern era Baghdad became the capital of the British-backed kingdom in 1921, and Kirkuk's oil was struck at Baba Gurgur in 1927. Saddam Hussein came from near Tikrit. After 2003 the region bore the worst of the insurgency and the sectarian war, which the 2006 bombing of Samarra's al-Askari shrine inflamed. In 2014 ISIS took Mosul and much of Anbar, Salah ad-Din and Nineveh, destroying Nimrud and Hatra's statues and murdering and enslaving Yazidis at Sinjar; Mosul was retaken in 2017 after months of fighting that left its old city in ruins.

The region straddles Iraq's main religious and ethnic lines. Baghdad is a mixed but now mainly Shia city, with Sunni districts such as Adhamiyah around the shrine of Abu Hanifa and the Shia shrine of Kadhimiya across the Tigris. The south of the region is the Shia heartland: Najaf is the seat of the senior Shia clergy, the marja'iyya, and its seminaries draw students from across the world. Anbar, Salah ad-Din and much of Nineveh are Sunni Arab and tribal, and Mosul has its own Arabic dialect, Maslawi. The Nineveh plains are home to Assyrian, Chaldean and Syriac Christians, Yazidis and Shabaks, and Kirkuk is shared, and disputed, by Kurds, Turkmen and Arabs.

The religious calendar shapes public life. During Muharram, black banners go up and processions re-enact the mourning for Hussein; for Arba'een, pilgrims walk for days to Karbala while roadside tents, the mawakib, feed them for free. Baghdad's literary pride centres on Mutanabbi Street and its coffee houses, such as the old Shabandar café, while Mosul's craftsmen worked in marble, and Kadhimiya's jewellers in gold.

Baghdad has around eight million people and dominates the country's government, business and culture. Mosul, Iraq's second city, is rebuilding; Kirkuk, Karbala, Najaf, Hillah, Ramadi, Fallujah, Samarra and Kut are the other main centres, and Karbala and Najaf live largely on the pilgrim trade, which brings visitors from Iran, the Gulf, South Asia and beyond.

Oil from the Kirkuk fields and a huge state payroll fund much of the economy; farming along the rivers grows wheat, barley, vegetables and dates, and Diyala province is known for its orange and date orchards. Water shortages, drought and salinity are hurting farmers, and power cuts in summer drive families to private generators.

Days start early and slow down in the afternoon heat; Baghdad's traffic backs up at checkpoints and bridges, and evenings bring families to the riverside corniche at Abu Nuwas and the parks. Reconstruction in Mosul and Anbar, the return of displaced families, jobs for the young and corruption are the questions that dominate.

Baghdad eats masgouf on the Tigris, but its breakfasts are just as famous: kahi, flaky layered pastry soaked in syrup and eaten with geymar clotted cream, and pacha, a dish of sheep's head, trotters and tripe simmered for hours. Samoon, a diamond-shaped bread baked in stone ovens, is sold hot on every street, and tepsi baytinjan, a baked dish of aubergine, meat and tomato, is a family standard.

Mosul gives its name to kubbat Mosul, a large flat disc of bulgur dough filled with spiced meat. In Karbala and Najaf, qeema, a thick stew of minced meat and chickpeas, is cooked in huge pots and handed out during Muharram, and hareesa, wheat and meat pounded into porridge, is shared the same way.

Dates, from the orchards of Diyala, Babil and Karbala, are eaten with every meal, pressed into dibis syrup and baked into klecha, date-filled pastries made for Eid. Tea in small istikan glasses, sweet and strong, runs all day.

Baghdad's sights line the Tigris: Mutanabbi Street and the Qishla, the 13th-century Mustansiriya madrasa, the National Museum of Iraq, the gold-domed Kadhimiya shrine, and the modern Al-Shaheed Monument. South-east of the city, the great brick arch of Taq Kasra at Ctesiphon still stands.

South, near Hillah, Babylon's ruins include the Processional Way, a replica of the Ishtar Gate and a palace Saddam built on the site; the ziggurat of Borsippa rises nearby. Karbala's shrines of Hussein and his brother Abbas face each other across a broad plaza, and Najaf's shrine of Imam Ali stands beside Wadi al-Salam, one of the largest cemeteries in the world, with the great mosque of Kufa close by.

North of Baghdad, Samarra's Great Mosque and its Malwiya minaret are part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and Assur lies further up the Tigris. Mosul's old city is being rebuilt around the al-Nuri mosque and its leaning minaret, destroyed in 2017 and reconstructed with UNESCO and Emirati funding; across the river lie the walls and gates of Nineveh. Hatra's temples stand in the desert to the south-west, and the Nineveh plains hold the monastery of Mar Mattai and the Christian town of Qaraqosh. Kirkuk has its ancient citadel and the flames of Baba Gurgur.

West, the Anbar desert runs from the Euphrates towns of Ramadi, Fallujah and Haditha, and the lakes of Habbaniyah and Tharthar, to the borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.