Believe it or not, one of the places I really wanted to visit as a kid was Iraq, specifically because of Baghdad's history. Baghdad was an extremely important intellectual center during the reign of the Abbasid Caliphate. That era's large amount of translators, scientists, and mathematicians are extremely important to the history of science. Hell, its where algebra was created! And even after the Mongols sacked Baghdad, a lot of these important works managed to get translated into other languages, being a major part of what sparked the age of enlightenment in Europe!
As you can imagine, Iraq's situations over the past decade have deeply saddened me.