iraq-stamps.com

After the first Gulf war, the north of Iraq was out of Iraqi government control and there was a kind of* state in the north where the Kurds live (Kurdistan) and they used to have their own government and their own money and also their own stamps.

Anyway with the fall of the Saddam regime and the fact that Iraq has a Kurdish president, I assumed that stamps in the Kurdish region are back to official Iraqi stamps. I'm not sure about this now that I saw a blog entry regarding Kurdish stamps which shows some stamps from 2005???

I wonder, are people still using local stamps in the Kurdish region? Or was that stopped after the elections.

Similar to the Macedonian army artistamps features before, here is a set commemorating the Georgian Army involvement in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Here are two sets of stamps commemorating the Iraqi provinces of Salahaddin and Basra.

Notice the value on the Salahaddin stamps in Arabic is actually reversed, an error!!  

Again on eBay I've seen a few items listed which might appeal to some inexperienced Iraq collectors or non Iraq collectors which are infact very common printing errors.

During the period of economic sanctions between 1991-2003 Iraqi stamps were printed cheaply and lots and lots of printing errors existed and could be reproduced by your home printer as the paper used for the stamps was cheaper than cheap to save money.

Here are some common problems with those kinds of stamps.

Written by ahmed zaki

1st sign
what si this 3 after An ? it just does not make sense to see such an error

2nd sign
the 1 is just too thick

3rd sign
the 1 and the An are leveled (one the same line) and if you verify all these forged stamps we can see that the distance and level between the 1 and the An is the same, also it is on the same base (i.e. leveled correctly). The original printed had two moving plates one for the "1" and the other for the "An" therefore you can see genuine stamps the An is sometimes below the level of 1, and sometimes it changes position.

4th sign
The "G" of Baghdad is not like any G seen on a genuine stamp, seems to be more circular than the genuine which is somehow oval.

5th sign
the "O" of OCCUPATION is the hardest part to be forged, we can clearly see how the O is disturbed and look closer to a round circuit than to an oval as the original.

6th sign
the "S" of BRITISH is very much different, this one is rounded ends while the original has extensions on both ends of the S.

And another one below

beside signs from last post, some new things are here:

sign 7:
in no way we can find a crescent without the ink, all "awlad alshohadaa" used in Iraq were inked by the British forces on the hands of the indians that came with them.

sign 8: unlike what we see on this stamp, on the originals the 1 is moved away from An so that they become on both sides of the crescent, as i stated earlier the 1 and An are moveable parts, that is not the case here.

sign 9: we can see that the IN BRITISH are very close to each others, this is not the case in the original and this also goes on other stamps which tells us that they are fixed parts in the forged printing.

This ridiculous attempt at fooling people into thinking this is a genuine error has to be the most outragious I have seen so far on eBay.

Judge for yourself. The World Cup 2002 MS, one has only the world cup and the other has the world cup missing, how convienient !!

Well I didn't know this but Macedonia was part of the coalition that invaded Iraq in 2003, and i found these stamps for sell on eBay which are artistamps. Not official stamps but certainly interesting and well made.

 

After the death of the former dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussain, a few interesting items have have come up for sale on eBay relating to stamps.

Here are three such FDCs, they are very collectable and I really like them.

Two FDCs feature USA stamps, from both Gulf war eras, and the other one has an Australian stamp on it.

Written by ahmed zaki

Has a cancellation with "MEF" which is the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (also BMEF), these are British HQ formed mainly in Italian colonies in the Mediterranean, like tripoli, salonika, areteria and somalia, some information about these you can find here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Expeditionary_Force

But these never reached Iraq or Baghdad !! how how can we have an Iraqi stamop cancelled with such a cancellation that was used in another region ?

Sign 20 or 30 or 40: The ink used to hide "awlad alshohada" is very shallow while the ink that was used was VERY thick because it was dry ink, the stamp is washed many times and this ink cannot be effected, this one you can even read what is written below the ink in the crescent.

Written by ahmed zaki

Turn the stamp 90CW, you will have the honour to see a stamp of Baghdad issue with HAIFFA (Palestine) cancellation. check (Ottoman Empire Cancellations part2), it can be no. 54, 55, 56, 57 or 58 (see pp. 76), i cannot identify which one precisely because only about 20% of it is visible on the stamp.

A palestine cancellation on Iraqi stamp????

Here is another with Haiffa cancellation and the ink used to print , is very low in density and shallow