Various applications central to societal functioning, such as traffic control and parking management, are fundamentally rooted in License Plate Recognition (LPR). The type of license plate significantly impacts the effectiveness of these processes. This study focuses on the 2022 Unified Modern Iraqi license plates, which pose a unique challenge due to their recent design that incorporates the representation of governorate names with symbols. This new design introduces difficulties in accurately recognizing characters, leading to potential misinformation and unreliable applications. Furthermore, there is a dearth of recognition systems specifically tailored for these newly designed plates. In an attempt to surmount these hurdles, this paper introduces a comparative analysis of two models based on stateof-the-art machine and deep learning methods. The first model employs Tesseract by OpenCV for the recognition of characters on the detected plate, while the second model utilizes a nine-layer Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The research contributes to the field by collating the plates into a dataset and recognizing them for the first time using these models. The results indicate a significant disparity in the performance of the two models, with the CNN model exhibiting superior accuracy in character recognition, surpassing 95.5%, while the Tesseract OpenCV model achieved a rate of merely 36%. This study underscores the potential of deep learning methods in augmenting license plate recognition systems, especially for novel designs like the 2022 Unified Modern Iraqi license plates.