The New York Times reports on the reopening of the ruins of Babylon to the public.

BABYLON, Iraq — After decades of dictatorship and disrepair, Iraq is celebrating its renewed sovereignty over the Babylon archaeological site — by fighting over the place, over its past and future and, of course, over its spoils. Time long ago eroded the sun-dried bricks that shaped ancient Babylon, the city of Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar, where Daniel read the writing on the wall and Alexander the Great died. Colonial archaeologists packed off its treasures to Europe a century ago. Saddam Hussein rebuilt the site in his own megalomaniacal image. American and Polish troops turned it into a military camp, digging trenches and filling barricades with soil peppered with fragments of a biblical-era civilization. Now, the provincial government in Babil has seized control of much of Babylon — unlawfully, according to the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage — and opened a park beside a branch of the Euphrates River, a place that draws visitors by the busload…. Now with the support of some officials in Baghdad, the local government has reopened the excavated ruins of Babylon’s ancient core, shuttered ever since the American invasion in 2003. It has done so despite warnings by archaeologists that the reopening threatens to damage further what remains of one of the world’s first great cities before the site can be adequately protected.

The full story is here.

The traditional tomb of Ezekiel is being renovated by the Iraqi government. From the Jerusalem Post:

The Iraqi government has launched a project to renovate the interior of the prophet Ezekiel’s shrine in the small town of Kifl, south of Baghdad, and the country’s Ministry for Tourism and Antiquities says it hopes to eventually repair and renovate other Jewish sites across the country.
“The ministry is concerned with all Iraqi heritage, whether it is Christian or Jewish or from any other religion,” ministry spokesman Abdelzahra al-Talaqani told AFP. “The present plans do not include the synagogues in Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Fallujah and other places because of lack of funding, but I think they will be included in future plans.”
Iraqi Jewry was once one of the largest and most prominent Jewish communities in the Middle East.
But after Israel’s establishment, more than 120,000 Iraqi Jews moved to Israel in the 1950s in a clandestine operation dubbed Operation Ezra and Nehemiah amid an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence.
Outside the shrine of the prophet – who followed Jews into the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BC – is a 14th-century brick minaret, while the inside is shaped like a synagogue, with old wooden arks that used to contain Torah scrolls and the remains of a Mehitza – a separation for men and women….
The tombs of the prophets Daniel, Ezra, Nahum and Jonah are also purported to be located in Iraq.

You can add this to your list of sites to visit on your next trip.

Traditional tomb of Ezekiel, exterior, 1932
Photo: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-matpc-13265

Traditional tomb of Ezekiel, interior, 1932
Photo: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-matpc-13271