UMM QASR, Iraq – The road approaching the Basra Gateway hotel in southern Iraq crosses a landscape so blighted with trash and spilled crude oil, which shimmers in gigantic pools in the sand, that it is difficult to imagine any guests ever passing this way.  

When they do arrive, guests are greeted by a jumble of concrete blocks, sand bags and barbed wire – the hotel’s front gate. Instead of a doorman, Basra Gateway employs a gunman.  

He smiles and pulls back a coil of razor wire, welcoming travellers to this improbable hotel, which has opened within what used to be Camp Bucca, a U.S. prison base with a notorious reputation among Iraqis.  

Basra Gateway is one of the fledgling efforts by Iraqi companies to make good commercial use of hundreds of recently abandoned U.S. military bases – usually desolate, off-putting ensembles of concrete on the edges of towns. The hotel’s developer and operator, the Kufan Group, is hoping to lure executives from oil and oil-services companies that operate in the nearby fields. The trailers-cum-hotel rooms go for about $190 a night, and they can be booked only in blocks in advance.  

“The dream that we have is to turn this into a commercial oasis,” said Maythem H. al-Asadi, Kufan’s president. “It’s only a matter of time.”  

The company’s venture, as with others that have taken over U.S. bases, relies on hundreds of U.S. military residential trailers, known as CHUs, from the acronym for containerized housing unit. They had once accommodated guards. Kufan workers installed indoor plumbing in some, creating the guest rooms.  

Besides the few upgrades to the trailers, the prison remains unaltered and eerily empty, the wind whistling through the old guard towers.  

The U.S. military is handing over all bases to the Iraqi government by the end of the year. Only about a half-dozen of the 505 bases in Iraq are still in U.S. hands.  

Most are becoming Iraqi military bases, with some exceptions. The Saddam Hussein-era palaces at the Victory Base Complex near Baghdad, once used by U.S. generals, for example, may become a convention centre.  

Other bases, left empty by the Americans, were promptly looted of air-conditioners and refrigerators, items now showing up in Iraqi flea markets.  

The Kufan Group obtained Camp Bucca from the Iraqi government at an auction, with an eye toward creating a hotel, logistics centre and container storage area for the oil industry. At first glance, it hardly seems an auspicious site: The panoramic scene of storm fencing and coiled razor wire resembles nothing so much as the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and its former function was similar.  

Regardless, the hotel opened on Nov. 24 to coincide with an oil and gas conference in nearby Basra. Amar Latif, Basra Gateway’s general manager, said his guests appreciate “our many layers of dirt berms” and other walls.  

The transformation is emblematic of one particularly optimistic vision, held by some businessmen, of what Iraq may become after the U.S. withdrawal, despite lingering sectarian tensions and persistent insurgent violence. Iraq, they say, is poised now to move quickly from war to an oil boom of historic proportions that will quickly inflate the economy and generate exceptional opportunities for companies that get in early.  

The city of Basra, despite its present impoverished appearance, sits above immense wealth. Oil production, mostly from fields near here, is projected to increase faster in Iraq than in any other country in the world over the next 25 years, according to International Energy Agency projections.  

If all goes well, production in Iraq will rise by an additional 5 million barrels per day by 2035, bringing the total to more than 8 million barrels per day. For comparison, that is more than a third of all the oil consumed each day in the United States, a vast fortune in energy.  

As the military leaves, the oil-services companies Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Schlumberger and Weatherford International are expanding operations, hopeful of economic growth. General Electric opened three offices in Iraq in November, a month before the last U.S. soldier is to march out.  

At the former U.S. prison camp, for example, oil companies are considering renting space on a permanent basis for employees, according to the Kufan Group.  

On the downside, Iraq’s security situation is still so dismal that a former prison appears alluring as a hotel.