“Iraq, with all of its history, all of its civilizations—it doesn’t need advertisements,” Semeism said, pointing to the scale models of the ziggurat of Samarra—one of the country’s best-known landmarks—that populate his office’s otherwise empty bookshelves. “All of the world knows the history of Iraq.”

When we spoke, Semeism was also pinning his hopes on Basra, the oil-rich southern city selected in 2009 to host 2013’s Gulf Cup, a popular regional soccer tournament. On a subsequent trip to Basra, I saw yellow construction cranes perched over the skeleton of an architecturally striking 65,000-seat soccer stadium being built for the tournament. Local officials boasted of expecting so many visitors that they were planning to anchor cruise ships along Basra’s main waterway to house the influx.

Semeism, a heavyset man with a quick smile, joined the political party of the firebrand Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in 2005 and has held his post, on and off, since 2006. During the worst days of Iraq’s civil war, Semeism’s predecessors focused on discouraging Western tourists from visiting their country, not persuading them to come. In an interview in late 2004, Ahmad al-Jobori, Iraq’s tourism director at the time, flatly told me that Iraq was too dangerous for foreign visitors. “I understand all about wanting to have an adventure, but Iraq could be a one-way trip,” he said then. “This is just not a place for tourists.”

Semeism, unsurprisingly, dismisses safety concerns. “This is not 2004, or even 2010,” he told me.

He could point to some recent successes. The ministry is helping a welter of private companies build 70 new hotels in the Shia holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, which draw huge numbers of religious pilgrims. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government had also spent $50 million to rehab three of Baghdad’s biggest and most storied hotels—the Palestine, the Ishtar Sheraton (which has no connection to the Sheraton company), and the Baghdad Hotel—as part of a $195 million plan to beautify large swaths of the city in preparation for an Arab League summit that had been scheduled for last May. The ministry printed its first tourism pamphlet in 2011 and began sending the four-page booklet by the thousands to travel agencies in the region. Officials plan to buy increasing amounts of print ads in major Arabic-language newspapers and magazines later this year.

In some respects, these efforts appear to be paying off. The number of tourists visiting Iraq is growing rapidly. Semeism estimates that 1.5 million people visited the country last year, up from 1.25 million in 2009 and just 266,000 in 2006. This year, he hopes to break the 2 million mark.

Semeism’s staffers, however, privately admit that those numbers don’t tell the full story. The overwhelming majority of Iraq’s visitors are Shia pilgrims from Iran, who come in droves to visit the ancient mosques of Najaf and Karbala. Westerners are still largely avoiding Iraq; ministry staff estimate that fewer than 200 tourists from the U.S., the U.K., and other Western countries will visit this year.