Around 300 thousand tourists expected to visit Kurdistan for Eid

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The Kurdistan Region’s tourism board is projecting that around 300,000 tourists will visit the Region during the four days of the Islamic Eid al-Adha holiday.

“During the summertime, schools close and temperatures in central and southern Iraq rise even further, which increases the demand to travel to the Kurdistan Region’s tourist resorts further. The Kurdistan Region is currently the number one destination for Iraqi citizens looking to enjoy a good time,” Ibrahim Abdulmajeed, head of the board’s media department, told Rudaw’s Soran Hussein on Sunday.

He added that all the preparations have been made to receive the visitors, including coordination with hotels, resorts, and security checkpoints. The tourist groups can finish the executive procedures and enter the Kurdistan Region within five minutes, according to Abdulmajeed.

Eid al-Adha is one of the two main Muslim holidays which will start next week and last for four days.

With its relatively moderate temperature in comparison to the rest of the country and its tremendous nature, the Kurdistan Region’s tourism has been a booming sector in recent years.

The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in April said that 200 thousand tourists visited the Kurdistan Region during the Islamic holiday, Eid al-Fitr, adding that around 1.7 million tourists visited the Region in the first four months of the year.

The government plans to attract 20 million tourists per year by 2030. Over 7.2 million people visited the Kurdistan Region in 2023.