Wathiq Al-Salihi gained a BA in Archaeology at the College of Arts of the University of Baghdad in 1962, and a PhD in Classical Archaeology at Princeton University in 1969. He worked at the State Board of Antiquities until 1978, where he was field director of the expedition to Hatra. He then taught at the University of Baghdad and also supervised the work at Hatra. In 1988 he became Professor of Archaeology, and in 1989 he was a Fulbright scholar at UCLA and the University of Pittsburg. He taught Classical Archaeology and Ancient History at the College of Arts, University of of Sanaa, Yemen, until 2014 when he immigrated to Canada. He has written numerous articles published in various scholarly journals and supervised many MA and PhD theses at the universities of Baghdad and Sanaa.