When Baghdad’s five-star Al Rasheed Hotel opened four decades ago, it was billed as “more than a hotel”. The late-modernist building was intended, among other hotels, to host the 1983 Non-Aligned Movement summit, a gathering of countries that were aligned neither to the United States nor the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The hotel would never actually serve that purpose, but it nevertheless went on to become a place central to the turbulent events that the Iraqi capital experienced over the decades, not least as the place where foreign journalists reported from in 1991 during the first Gulf War.
Of all the hotels that filmmaker Abdallah El Binni and I researched for our book War Hotels (2022) and the Al Jazeera documentary series of the same name – which explored establishments such as the Caravelle in Saigon (today’s Ho Chi Minh City), Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn, and the Europa in Belfast – the Al Rasheed is perhaps the hotel that has had the most tumultuous history.
