Iraq’s biggest oil field entrusted to Maltese drilling expert

54-year-old Raymond Mallia has worked in Libya Kazakhstan and Bangladesh, and on oil rigs off the coast of Kuwait and Iran. It was there, he said, that he saw the first cruise missiles that were fired by US destroyers at Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the spring of 2003: "At the time, I couldn't have imagined that it would take nearly 10 years before we also seriously started to dig here."

In the palm groves a few kilometres  east of Baghdad- an area where for years foreigners would only venture in heavily armed convoys - Raymond Mallia is now drilling for the heavy oil of the East Baghdad field.

With over eight billion barrels of extractable oil, East Baghdad is what's known as a super-giant oil field. There are only a few dozen oil fields of this size in the world, and even in this exclusive club East Baghdad is an exception: part of the field lies under the city of Baghdad, with its 7 million residents - specifically, under the Shiite district of Sadr City, which was the scene of particularly brutal sectarian fighting.

Der Spiegel says that despite all the cynicism that a career in the oil fields tends to invite, Mallia remains upbeat and optimistic about what he's doing here. "Iraq is an absolute hit in the oil world," he says. "The Chinese and the Indians need this stuff, and the Iraqis have it. They'd have to do just about everything wrong to keep this country from booming in a few years."

Day and night, Mallia uses his drilling rig to drive one rod after the other into the loamy soil. He has drilled two wells: the first one is already producing 2,000 barrels a day, and the second one has just struck oil at a depth of 3,600 meters (11,800 feet).

Two young Canadian logging engineers use sensors to calculate the expected yield. It will take hundreds of such wells before the East Baghdad oil field can be exploited at anything close to capacity. Since it lies in a densely populated area, the work is proceeding much slower than in the desert regions of southern Iraq.

Mallia's boss, Majid Abdullah, 61, has also worked abroad for 30 years. One year ago, he decided to finally return to his native country.

If he was only 30, he wouldn't have done it, Abdullah said, but now he's willing to risk spending the rest of his career in his volatile homeland in the hope of a few stabile years. "East Baghdad is for me the most convenient oil field of my life," he said. "I can drive home after every shift and sleep in my own bed."

Abdullah's confidence doesn't have much of a political spin - it's purely an oil man's view. As he knows, especially after having to flee the turmoil of revolutionary Libya, producing oil is not enough to build a sustainable economy and establish a stable State. It requires a modicum of security, and legal and political predictability. And it necessitates pipelines, pumps, oil depots and secure ports to export the crude oil.

He is thankful that the Iraqis have started expanding their port facilities. In early March, at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab River, the first of four new mooring stations went into operation.

They are colossal installations, attached to deep-sea buoys, where oil tankers can be filled. Until now, Iraq has had only one functioning oil terminal, which was crucial to the economic survival of the entire country: 95% of the national budget is financed by oil exports - and 80% of this oil was pumped into the tankers via the eight filling stations at the Basra terminal.