You might think he would be starting to despair by now. But the head of Iraq's tourism board, Ahmed al-Jabouri, is a confident man.
He insists he has a "happy heart" when he thinks about the tourism potential of a country that, while one of the most dangerous places in world, prides itself on being the cradle of civilisation.
His 2,474 staff are keeping themselves busy.
The tourism board says it has 14 centres open around the country from Basra in the south, to Saddam Hussein's hometown Tikrit, to Mosul - where insurgents recently took over the city's police stations.
There's even an office in Ramadi, despite regular fighting between American troops and rebels.
"My staff check on hotels and restaurants and award licenses," says Mr Jabouri, a former army officer and dissident who fled from Baghdad to Kurdistan under Saddam Hussein. So will 2005 be any better than 2004? Again, Mr Jabouri is optimistic.
"We have a plan to build many things," he says. "We have many projects."
Among them, he says, is a plan to develop an area of Baghdad along the river Tigris into a "new tourism city". The district, Wedding Island, is said to have been a popular night-time spot in Saddam’s days. Mr Jabouri says Iraqi companies are already working on the new project. |