Lecturer: Dr. Torhan Al-Mufti, Chairman of the High Committee for Religious Tourism.

Moderator: Dr. Talib Mohammed Karim , Vice Chairman of Al-Rafidain Center for Dialogue  RCD.

Al-Rafidain Center for Dialogue  RCD organized a panel discussion entitled "Religious Tourism: Maximizing Federal and Local Imports" lectured by Dr. Torhan Al-Mufti, Chairman of the High Committee for Religious Tourism in Iraq, and Chairman of the Coordinating Body between the Provinces and representative of the Government in the parliament. Dr. Al-Mufti spoke about the importance of maximizing government resources in Iraq and the Iraqi government's efforts to achieve this through the development of the tourism sector, especially religious tourism, and referred in that context to several government initiatives to stimulate that sector, including the formation of the High Committee for Religious Tourism and the existence of an idea to establish the Supreme Council of Tourism, practically the lecturer showed some projects in that regard, including the issuance of a unified tourism guide and the E-Visa project, which will provide Iraq with additional funds, as the lecturer spoke about the government's quest to intercession between religious tourism and urban or archaeological tourism to take advantage of archaeological sites scattered in all regions of Iraq.

During the panel, many of the problems suffered by the religious tourism sector in Iraq and ways to find appropriate solutions were raised, one of the problems is the reliance of religious tourism on visitors of the same nationality, namely Iranians, as well as the problem of high government tax rates on hotels, as well as high wages for infrastructure lists such as water, electricity, generator fuel wages, etc. The panel was attended by a distinguished group of government officials specialized in the field of tourism, such as the Director General of Tourism in the Ministry of Culture, representatives of the Sunni Endowment Office and representatives of the Ministries of Interior and Foreign Affairs, as well as representatives from the private sector, including those specialized in the tourism and hotel sector.

Below are the most important outcomes of the panel discussion:

1-      There is an urgent need in Iraq to maximize government imports at the federal and local levels, and one of the most important sectors that can invest in this field is the tourism sector, especially religious tourism, because of Iraq’s abundance of religious shrines, which are scattered in some Iraqi provinces and attract millions of visitors annually.

2-      For the purpose of revitalizing, developing and investing in the religious tourism sector in a way that brings an important benefit to the country, the Iraqi government's initiative was to form the High Committee for Religious Tourism, which included representatives of endowments and some provinces such as Najaf, Karbala, Baghdad, the Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The most important idea for the development of the reality of tourism is the establishment of the Supreme Tourism Council, headed by the prime minister, which gives it important executive powers to develop this sector.

3-      The High Committee for Religious Tourism in Iraq aims at a number of objectives, the most important of which is the interlock between religious tourism and archaeological tourism, as tourists visiting the holy shrines of Najaf and Holy Karbala can be encouraged to go to Babylon or any other archaeological areas that spread in Iraq from north to south.

4-      The Iraqi state spends more money on million visits than visitors coming to the same visit, as it allocates to the holy provinces of Najaf and Karbala from emergency budgets after each million visit, and to address this imbalance, a plan has been drawn up to reach the level of equality between what is obtained and what is spent during the visits within a period of five years, but the most distant goal is to reach 20% of the budget value resulting from religious tourism.

5-      One of the most important shortcomings in the tourism reality in Iraq is the inequality between the owners of tourism companies in obtaining tourist groups for tourists are not distributed to the owners of tourism companies fairly and in order to avoid this imbalance there is a need to adopt a single window, which allows the Iraqi government to distribute tourists entering Iraq equally among the owners of tourism companies, as well as to deal with tourists who enter and do not leave Iraq.

6-      There are modernization projects adopted by the High Committee for Religious Tourism aimed at developing this sector, including the project of issuing a unified tourism guide, which includes religious and archaeological sites in Iraq, which is carried out in cooperation with the Shiite Waqf Office and the electronic visa application project, which it is working on in cooperation with the Sunni Endowment in Iraq.

7-      The development of the tourism sector in Iraq needs to enact new laws such as the imposition of a tourism tax and others, and since the enactment of laws of a financial nature is a complex process in Iraq, it takes time to be accomplished, and the bureaucratic mentality of many Iraqi employees who are accustomed to the central state system stands in the way of the transfer of powers to the provinces to promote the reality of tourism and the development of local resources for the provinces.

8-      Political stability is necessary for the development of tourism without political stability, as the current situation in Iraq poses many challenges and priorities for the state before the issue of tourism. However, the 2019 budget will see a special local revenue tab from the provinces, which are derived from various resources, including religious tourism, for the first time in Iraq’s budget history.

9-      The memorandums of understanding for the tourism sector in Iraq are outdated and expired and have not occurred and efforts are being made by the Iraqi government to sign memorandums of understanding with several countries taking into account the specificity of each country when signing the memorandum of understanding with it.

10-   The dependence of religious tourism in Iraq on visitors of the same nationality, the Iranians, has made it vulnerable and stalled, and the decline in the number of Iranian visitors at present has negatively affected hotel owners, represented by the lack of hotel occupancy and the halving of its real estate value, so the sources of religious tourism must be diversified and open to other countries to strengthen that sector.

11-   What the religious tourist currently spend is $15-20, an amount that does not meet the aspirations of hotel owners who bear the cost of free overnight stays for the driver and assistant, as well as high wages for government infrastructure such as water, electricity, sanitation and generator fuel.

12-   The overlap between Iraqi state institutions in the granting of visa such as the Ministry of Interior and Foreign Affairs makes the Iraqi visa one of the most difficult in the world and the granting of visa inside the airport will greatly facilitate the entry of tourists.