Kuwaiti investor Abdul Aziz al-Babtain looks forward to planting 100,000 palms of date palms and building a natural reserve for ostriches and deer in lands that were a battlefield of the Gulf War in 1991 and deep into the desert in southern Iraq .

Few Kuwaiti companies have resumed business in Iraq since Saddam Hussein invaded his neighbor in 1990 and then liberated Kuwait a year later.

The businessman, Babtain, is pumping $ 58 million into a date farm project in the southern Badia, about 150 km from the port of Basra , officials said.

" He hopes to grow 100,000 palm trees in the next five to six years," Reuters quotedZia al-Shuraideh, al-Babtain's deputy in Iraq, as saying, adding that "dates will be sold first in Iraq and exported at a later stage. Palm".

Iraq once produced three-quarters of the world's production of dates, but now produces only 5 percent after decades of conflict, although it is home to about 350 species of date palm.

A banner in Al-Babtain's office showed that the businessman started working on the farm in the 1980s, but Iraq confiscated it after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and turned it into a military zone because of its proximity to the Kuwaiti border and dug trenches for heavy weapons.

The area was bombed by air strikes in the framework of the liberation campaign of Kuwait, but the authorities did not clean the trenches, leaving gunshots and parts of rusty tank towers close to the farm.

In an attempt to start a new page, Iraq returned the farm to Babtain and granted tax exemptions.

The farm has created about 50 jobs in this devastated area, and will need about 500 workers when palm production begins. In a second step, Babtain plans to create a nature reserve to import ostriches and deer, according to Shreideh.