IKB Travel, based in London promised to offer guided tours to Iraq in May and September of this year. Well at least Kurdistan. Saad al-Khafaji recently returned from Erbil and claimed " We were totally safe without any bodyguards of our own and we watched the US troops walk around the city without their guns," in promotional piece on the Kurdish Government web site.

Tour organizer will be Hinterland Travel who also runs tours to Afghanistan and Kashmir. Hinterland boasts of tours to "war zones" which leads Slogger to think the group may be at cross purposes with the Kurdish development plan. Hinterland prefers to call Iraq "Mesopotamia", The North of Iraq likes to call itself Kurdistan or in its ads "the Other Iraq"

And not coincidently, Nimrud Baito, Minister of Tourism for the KRG is looking for investors in the tourism sector. Currently only one international carrier, Austrian Airlines flies into Erbil. And for a little comic relief some insight what flying commercial airlines inside Iraq is like these days.