Iraq document photos online

For more than a decade after the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq effectively ran two rival currencies at once — and the older, cheaper-looking one became the stronger. Baghdad printed new "Saddam dinars" by the truckload, but the Kurdistan Region refused them and kept circulating the pre-war notes nicknamed "Swiss dinars." Because their supply stayed fixed while Saddam notes flooded the south, the Swiss dinar appreciated dramatically and shielded the north from runaway inflation. When the two were finally unified in 2003-2004, authorities set the rate at 150 Saddam dinars to a single Swiss dinar — a rare case of a banknote's reputation outliving the state that issued it.

• Currency After 1991 Iraq had two competing versions of its own currency, and the older "Swiss dinar" used in Kurdistan grew so much stronger that it took 150 Saddam-era dinars to buy one of the old notes by 2003.
• Passport The Iraqi passport is one of the weakest in the world: in 2025 the Henley Passport Index gave it visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to only about 30 destinations, near the very bottom of the global ranking.
• Currency name The dinar's name traces back to the Roman denarius, while its old subdivision, the fils, descends from the fals — a copper coin first struck by the Umayyad Caliphate in the late 7th century.
• Vanished coin One Iraqi dinar was once divided into 1,000 fils, but inflation wiped the subdivision out entirely — today the dinar itself is the smallest unit actually used, and fils coins survive only with collectors.
• First writing The world's earliest known writing — proto-cuneiform pressed into clay around 3300 BCE — was invented in the city of Uruk in southern Iraq, and it began not as poetry but as accounting records of goods and labor.
• First city Uruk, in modern southern Iraq, is often called the first true city in human history, sprawling across roughly 250 hectares and giving the entire country of "Iraq" a claim to the birthplace of urban life.
• Statehood Iraq was the very first League of Nations mandate to gain independence, admitted as a sovereign state on 3 October 1932 — and the first Arab country ever to join the League.
• Census gap Iraq's November 2024 census was its first complete nationwide count in 37 years — the previous full census dated to 1987 — and it deployed roughly 125,000 enumerators with tablets, counting 46.1 million residents.
• Document oddity Iraq's official 2024 census deliberately asked no question about ethnicity, sidestepping the politically explosive task of tallying Arabs, Kurds and others in a single document.