Over 40,000 tourists visited Duhok during Eid holiday

The week-long Eid holidays attracted tens of thousands of tourists to the Kurdistan Region's Duhok province, famous for its many tourist destinations.

At least 40,000 tourists visited the province during Eid al-Fitr, the Duhok tourism directorate spokesperson Rewar Mohammed Saeed told Kurdistan 24.

There are more than 900 licensed tourism sites in Duhok and 250 natural resorts.

"Most resorts are located in Amedi district northeast of Duhok city. For this reason, Amedi normally attracts the highest number of tourists annually," Saeed said.

Akre, Zakho, and Shekhan districts also received sizable numbers of tourists.

Duhok's tourism directorate dispatched teams to checkpoints to welcome tourists traveling to the province with free sweets as part of a special initiative.

Bushra Ali, a tourist from Baghdad, told Kurdistan 24 that she comes to Duhok's resorts every summer on vacation. She decided to travel early this year for the Eid holidays and was delighted to see the weather was amazing.

"A severe sandstorm swept across Baghdad during the Eid holidays," she said. "Luckily in Duhok, everything about the weather was great."

Duhok tourism directorate explained that most tourists were from central and southern Iraq. It is working on attracting more tourists from the Kurdish areas of Turkey, and it is already having some observable success.

Duhok tourism authorities organized an exhibition in 2021 attended by 45 travel and tourism agencies from Turkey.

More recently, the Duhok tourism directorate visited Diyarbakir this March to oversee the signing of contracts between travel agencies in Duhok and Diyarbakir.

The number of tourists from Turkey's Kurdish-majority regions to Duhok has been increasing, Saeed told Kurdistan 24.

"In Newroz (Kurdish New Year) of 2021, more than 2,000 tourists from North of Kurdistan (Turkish Kurdistan) visited Duhok," Saeed said, adding that number doubled to 4,000 in the Newroz of 2022.

Every year new tourism sites are developed in Duhok. Twenty new sites have been added to the already growing number of these sites in 2022, allowing Duhok to welcome and accommodate more tourists every year.