Iraq is planning to offer some of its public hotels and other tourism facilities to private investors within a new strategy to promote tourism and diversify its oil-reliant economy, an adviser to the Prime Minister said in comments published on Tuesday.

Qahtan Al-Jabbour, adviser for tourism and antiquities, said Iraq’s tourism industry has remained untapped for many years due to internal upheavals despite the country’s “massive tourist potential”.

“There are instructions by the Prime Minister to work for stimulating the tourism sector in Iraq to tap its massive potential and diversify sources of income,” Jabbouri told a local tourism seminar in the capital Baghdad on Monday.

“There has been a long delay in efforts to give attention to this sector…now there is a tendency by the authorities concerned to offer hotels and other tourist and cultural facilities to the private sector…a plan in this respect will be announced soon,” he said in the comments, published on Tuesday by the official Iraqi News Agency.

(Writing by Nadim Kawach; Editing by Anoop Menon)

(anoop.menon@lseg.com)

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