Najaf is not the only part of Iraq to experience a fresh start after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Further south, Basra seems to be waking up from a sleep of decades during which it had morphed into a ghost town. Once the largest port in the Persian Gulf, Basra lost its access to open waters in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war. The Shatt al-Arab estuary, linking Basra to the waters of the Persian Gulf, was turned into a graveyard of ships, tankers and fishing boats sunk by Iranian forces to block marine traffic, virtually transforming Iraq into a landlocked nation. Today, like Najaf, Basra is a boomtown. Walking along the corniche, abandoned for years but now being cleaned and opened to traffic, a British contractor tells a reporter he dreams of the day Basra becomes "a second Dubai" and a hub of international trade for the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Between 1980 and 2003 Basra lost almost half its population. Many moved to other parts of Iraq and some went into exile, as far away as Latin America. Between 2003 and 2008 a second wave saw many Sunni families moving out of Basra as it fell under the domination of militant Shia groups backed by Iran. Today, the flow is reversed and many families are returning. According to the provincial governor, over the past five years Basra has gained more than 100,000 people, a development that has fuelled a real estate boom.

Further south, on the Kuwaiti frontier, the port of Um al-Qasr is back in operation for the first time since 1980. In 2002, I visited Um al-Qasr with a United Nations peacekeeping officer as guide. It, too, was a ghost town, where stray dogs fought on what had been the port's principal boulevard. Ten years later, the port is a hub of business activity that helps supply Iraq's economic boom.

Najaf, Basra and Um al-Qasr are not alone in experiencing an unprecedented peace and the promise of prosperity. With slight variations, one can witness a similar picture in every part of Iraq. In the three northern provinces, under an autonomous Kurdish government for more than 20 years, the transformation is even more dramatic, with pockets of prosperity that look more like Switzerland than the remote mountains of north-eastern Iraq.

Baghdad, where some streets even at the centre of the city were no-go areas until 2008, has been slower in moving beyond the nightmare of despotism, war and sectarian violence. Nevertheless, even there a new atmosphere of peace and hope is gradually setting in. The dismantling of most of the walls and barbed wire that chopped the city into an archipelago of armed camps is restoring a measure of harmony without which this majestic capital could not realise its dreams of grandeur.

By all measures, Iraq is experiencing an economic revival:  living standards are on an upward trend for the first time since the 1970s. For much of the past decade, Iraq's growth rate has hovered around 12 per cent, according to estimates by the World Bank, making it the fastest growing economy in the Middle East. The Iraqi dinar, the national currency, has more than quadrupled in value, outperforming the region's other oil-based currencies including the Kuwaiti dinar and the Iranian rial. Three factors have contributed to this "economic miracle". The first is the return of stability after the "surge" in 2008. Over the past five years, the number of terrorist operations has dropped by almost 90 per cent, although the country is still hit by occasional spectacular attacks. At the same time the disarming of militias, including the Mahdi army, has reduced criminal activities by rival sectarian gangs.