New Iraqi Dinar: Banknotes for a New Age

The new Iraqi dinar has six available denominations. All of them are printed on quality paper by the De La Rue England based company. This is the very same company that printed the Swiss dinar used prior to the Saddam’s one. And unlike the Saddam’s old dinars, the new ones have a lot of security features making them much tougher to counterfeit.

The design on the new Iraqi dinar was created by the Central Bank of Iraq, and is a mix of new values and historical images. It is supposed to show the harmony between old and new amongst the Iraqi people.

The new Iraqi dinar was made available in 6 denominations: 25,000, 10,000, 5,000, 1,000, 250 and 50. Their pictures and a brief description on the images depicted on each one is shown below –- the currency descriptions, as well as much of the information on this page, were presented by Hugh Tant III in a “Ask the White House” 2003 press interview. For more information on the interview see the resources page.

If you are interested in investing in the Iraqi dinars, then you’d want to get one of these new banknotes, as the old dinars bear no real value on the market. That is if you’re not a coin collector, in which case you may still find some on sale on eBay.

The 50 dinar note
The front of the 50 new Iraqi dinar banknote depicts a picture of the grain silo at Basrah. Working at full capacity the facility can off-load and process 60,000 tons of grain per hour. The back of the note shows date palms, as Iraq used to be the world's largest producer and exporter of dates. Currently over 600 varieties of date palms are grown in-country.

The 250 dinar note
The front side of the 250 new Iraqi dinar banknote shows the astrolabe. The astrolabe is one of the earliest scientific instruments - able to measure the time of day or night and altitude and latitude - conceived by the Greeks it was further developed by medieval Arab astronomers, who used it to help determine the time for fasting during the month of Ramadan. The back of the note shows the Spiral Minaret in Samarra, built 848-849 A.D. Samarra was then the Abbasid Empire's capital city.

The 1,000 dinar note
The front side of the 1000 new Iraqi dinar banknote shows a gold Islamic Dinar coin, minted in Damascus in the first century AD. The back side shows Al-Mustansirya University in Baghdad. The university was built in the mid-thirteenth century it was the most prominent university in the Islamic world in the middle Ages.

For the rest of denominations, continue to New Iraqi Dinar: Banknotes for a New Age -- Part 2