I bet you didn't know....

Now we may all hear a fair bit about the wars and suffering that have taken place in the countries that we work in. But here are a few things I bet you didn’t know about Iraq.....

The Iraqi football team is sometimes called the "Brazil of Asia" because this team is one of the Asia's most successful. It won fourth place during the Summer Olympic Games held in Athens, Greece, in 2004. Iraq was the only Asian country in the finals.

Haidari Buland Al was one of the best poets in free verse in modern Arab literature and he helped modernize Arabic poetry.

Zaha Hadid is an internationally acclaimed female Iraqi architect who won the international competition for the opera house in Cardiff. She also won the 2004 Pritzker Prize, which is architecture’s equivalent of the Noble Prize – she is the first woman ever to win such prestigious award. She has been professor at Yale, Harvard, Chicago, Hamburg, New York and Vienna.

The opening scene in the classic horror movie The Exorcist (1973), was filmed in Hatra in Northwest Iraq.

The region of Iraq used to be known as Mesopotamia. It was home to the world's first known civilization, whose influence extended into neighboring regions as early as 5000 BC.These civilizations produced some of the earliest writing and some of the first sciences, mathematics, laws and philosophies of the world, which is why it is often called the "Cradle of Civilization". Britain was well behind the times compared to these guys.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, near present-day Al Hillah in Iraq (formerly Babylon), is considered one of the original Seven Wonders of the World. They were built by Nebuchadnezzar II around 600 BCE.

Nebuchadnezzar is also the namesake of the main hovercraft featured in The Matrix and Matrix Reloaded; it is used by the main characters Morpheus, Neo, and Trinity.