must have been a fun trip
Indeed it was, with its moments, of course; discovering that in a Prentice the magnetos would short out in cloud with the moisture, as they did over the Italian hills in an ill-advised attempt to get to VFR on top without knowing where the top might be (the duty God was kind that day); later on an engine fire climbing away from Baghdad due to a missing exhaust gasket, leading to the discovery that although a firewire was fitted, it didn't work. There was no extinguisher in any case and never had been.
Flying from Damascus to Baghdad was a navigational challenge which I failed. 'Fly in controlled airspace or be shot down' was an incentive, but without an ADF and an absolutely featureless desert following the oil pipelines was the only way, reporting the NDBs visually, while pretending to be IFR-equipped and licensed. They tended be be sited at pumping stations, so the airway (base 8,000 ft, pretty much the aircraft's ceiling on a hot day) followed the pipelines. That worked until halfway when the dust haze removed any sight of the ground. Dead reckoning is easy crossing the Channel at 5Kts in my boat, less so in a Prentice when you have no reliable wind information, and I wandered inexorably off track, until I passed over a lake that I could recognise, about 50 Nm SW of Baghdad, with the fuel getting very low. By that time Baghdad was calling me, but I kept stumm until I could call "airfield in sight" as I didn't want to have to explain where I was. (When I reported in to ATC, I muttered about unexpected headwinds making me late, and then they gave me a carefully plotted radar map of exactly where I'd been since crossing the border, and we all had a jolly good laugh, as we did next day after I had left the aircraft, smoking gently, in the middle of the runway waiting for a firetruck and tow, just in their busy period.)