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TechnoratiDisputed Iraqi City Fears Oil Will Only Fuel Woes
KIRKUK, Iraq - Iraqi officials may have high hopes for what the vast oilfields near the city of Kirkuk can yield, but residents of the violent area have a different take on a resource they say has brought nothing but trouble.
![[Flames rise from a pipeline of an oilfield in Kirkuk city, about 250 km (155 miles) north of Baghdad, July 13, 2009. Iraqi officials may have high hopes for what the vast oilfields near the city of Kirkuk can yield, but residents of the violent area have a different take on the resource they say has brought them nothing but trouble. REUTERS/Ako Rasheed ]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/kirkuk_0.jpg "kirkuk.jpg")
The Oil Ministry plans to boost production in Kirkuk, with 13 percent of Iraq's proven reserves and a fifth of its output, and elsewhere in Iraq by luring major foreign energy firms for the first time since Saddam Hussein kicked them out in 1972.
Decrepit, trash-filled and dotted with crumbling buildings, paint peeling off their walls, the city certainly looks like it could use an injection of cash. Locals are skeptical.
"Kirkuk is like a camel," said local councilor Mohammed al-Jubouri, an Arab. "The camel carries gold and riches on its back, but ends up eating spiny shrubs scavenged in the desert."
Shared between Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen, the city north of Baghdad is at the heart of a power struggle between Iraq's Shi'ite Arab-led government and minority Kurds, a row that has replaced sectarian strife as a top threat to Iraqi stability.
Kurds claim Kirkuk as their historic capital and want to absorb it, with other disputed territories, into their largely autonomous northern region, an idea rejected with the city's Arab and Turkman residents and Iraq's government in Baghdad.
Like other ethnically mixed cities in the north, Kirkuk has suffered ongoing insurgent attacks even while security across much of the rest of Iraq improves. Major recent bombs, including two last month that killed 100 people between them, may have already stoked reprisal killings, police chief Jamal Bakr said.
"NOTHING BUT SUFFERING"
Oil is pivotal to the dispute. U.S. officials think Kirkuk may hold as much as 4 percent of the world's remaining reserves.
"We, all Kirkukis, wish oil would just go away ... It all the time brings us nothing but suffering," Kurd councilor Awat Mohammed told Reuters in the rundown provincial headquarters.
"Our conflicts are over oil. You see the city: can you imagine it is so rich? It looks like cities of the Middle Ages."
Nonetheless, Baghdad plans to push ahead with overhauling the oil sector in Kirkuk, an industry that has left the city encircled by cordoned-off mud fields ablaze with gas flares.
"I don't think anything here will improve with more oil investment," said Margaret William Yusuf, an Iraqi Christian living in Kirkuk. "It goes to the government and then it's every man for himself. It just means more fighting over us."
In a bidding round for six oil and two gas fields held at the end of last month, two of the fields on offer -- Bai Hassan and Kirkuk -- were in the Kirkuk area. None of the foreign firms present walked away with a contract for those fields.
Only one field was awarded: Rumaila, Iraq's largest producing field, went to a BP-led consortium.
Though a consortium led by Royal Dutch Shell bid for Kirkuk, they balked at the low fees Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani was willing to pay firms to develop the fields.
The Kurdish regional government (KRG) has condemned the Oil Ministry for putting fields in Kirkuk, as a disputed area, on the auction block without its consent.
"Keeping these issues unresolved are causes for uncertainty about Iraq. It's incumbent on all parties to find ways by which we can go beyond the impasse," Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, a Kurd, told Reuters in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya.
"The very fact that there is a dispute ... over Kirkuk is impeding the investment needed to boost oil production."
A United Nations report on Kirkuk delivered in April outlined options for settling the conflict, but it hasn't appeared to have ended the impasse over the city's future.
Kirkuk Governor Abdul Rahman Mustafa, a Kurd, told Reuters so far no party was ready to give any reaction to that report.
But Iraqi officials like to point out those who predict Kirkuk to be Iraq's "next war" have been doing so for some time.
"Analysts on the eve of the 2003 war predicted Kirkuk to be the powder keg that will ignite civil war in Iraq," Salih said. "It did not happen. The communities of Kirkuk stayed together. (We) ... are adamant not to let this thing get out of hand."
(Writing by Tim Cocks; Additional reporting by Ahmed Ali, Sherko Roauf and Abdul Rahman Taher; Editing by Sophie Hares)
3 Comments so far
Show All"Eager to Tap Iraq's Vast Oil Reserves, Industry Execs Suggested Invasion",
by Jason Leopold, The Public Record, PubRecord.org, July 1, 2009
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14322
I would say that that is definitely an important article. It certainly provides historical details about U.S. Big Oil, Cheney, James Baker, ... working together starting with Cheney's Energy Task Force session of January 2001.
Like Major Doug Rokke says in the following presentation of his, however, the U.S. began seriously planning to gain control of Iraq's oil reserves and, therefore, began planning for full-out war on Iraq in 1995, so during the Clinton administration. He also says, btw, that the U.S. started planning for overthrowing the Taliban in 1998, which is when they cut off the oil pipeline talks they had been secretly holding with Unocal and, I guess, probably some members of Congress and the Clinton administration.
"9-11.. Hello!: Major Doug Rokke" (10:35), Aug 19 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGVSHGWZ3JM
I haven't read or listened to the following piece at Dahr Jamail's website yet, but figure it should be good. I am searching for a very good article by him that I read and came across this piece during the search. This following interview has an audio for listen, instead of reading the transcript, but if people use only the audio, then note that there are "related" links following the interview transcript.
"The Oil Factor in the Iraq Study Group (Interview)
Interview with Dori Smith on Talk Nation Radio,
December 13, 2006
http://talknationradio.com"
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/the-oil-factor-in-the-iraq-study-group-interview
QUOTE:
Journalist Dahr Jamail speaks about the reality of the Iraq Study Group Report and what is going on in Iraq today: US support for death squad militias, US air attacks, and the steady intensification of the violence. If US forces withdrew there may be a potential for the Iraqis to contain the worst perpetrators of violence, but without a major policy change the potential for worsening chaos and wider war persists.
END QUOTE
NOTE: "US support for death squad militias" and there's a "related" article linked at the bottom of the page for this. It's the following.
QUOTE: "El Salvador-style ‘death squads’ to be deployed by US against Iraq militantsFrom Roland Watson in Washington, January 10, 2005, The Times."
Instead of using that link, I sought a copy and found the following.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=4027
QUOTE:
Global Research Editorial Note
This article first published in The Times in early 2005 acknowledges Washington's strategy of US sponsored death squadrons in Iraq. With John Negroponte now at the helm of the US intelligence apparatus, this strategy is now coming to fruition.
While the "death squadrons" were intended by the Bush adminstration to target "the leaders of Iraq's insurgency", they have been largely involved in the of killing of innocent civilians, with a view to creating conditions of ethnic strife and social conflict within Iraq. The El Salvador-style death squadrons have served to create a US sponsored "civil war".
Global Research, 1 December 2006
END QUOTE
Actually, verifying more closely, the above interview at Dahr Jamail's website is the piece I was looking for and I'll quote or excerpt a little from it.
QUOTE:
Dori Smith: You mention the Iraq Study Group Report and that report begins by calling the situation in Iraq, ‘grave and deteriorating.’ But it also happens to have the word, oil in it 63 times. And I would call the attention of anyone listening to this program to the web site USIP.org the U.S. Institute for Peace, where you can download the whole report in a PDF file.
Dahr, I know you questioned the presence of James Baker in the study group and you have talked about who he is as a kind of private citizen now having a huge impact on foreign policy. Just talk about the Iraq Study Group first in general and your impressions of the group itself.
Dahr Jamail: Ah yes James Baker who also was conveniently on the board of directors of Bechtel Corporation, awarded $2.3 billion dollars in contracts in Iraq. Talk about a conflict of interest. –A couple of other individuals who were very much involved in this report, another one who’s name is Edwin Meese III who is a member of this Iraq Study Study Group that produced this report; he also is a representative of the Heritage Foundation, a very conservative think tank in the United States that has been hawkish and very pro-war from the beginning. We also have to talk about the fact that James Carafano was also very instrumental in the Iraq Study Group’s Report and he is also a member of the Heritage Foundation. So there are conflicts of interest with the people involved in this report. And I think really you summed it up; the fact that the word ‘oil’ is mentioned in the report 63 times. I think basically this report is a smoke screen, an attempt by the U.S. Administration to kind of play the ‘good cop – bad cop’ game and using this rhetoric like oh it’s a ‘grave and deteriorating situation,’ as if this is going to address the problem. And the bottom line about this study group is that it does not talk about any firm dates or numbers for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from that country.
It does not talk about a legitimate government in that country where Iraqis would have real sovereignty. Instead it lays out the importance of oil for U.S. interests in the region and on page 1 of the entire report it talks about the fact that Iraq has the world’s second largest known oil reserves. Then it goes on in other areas of the report to mention very specific things they recommend to be done in order for the U.S. to get their hands on more of that oil.
END QUOTE
Other ways to consider this is according to John Perkins' books and life, about having been an economic hit man, and we can also consider that the US rather deliberately helped Usama Bin Ladin et alia leaders escape from Afghanistan to Pakistan around Nov. 25, 2001. Supporting links are in my third and fourth posts in the following page.
(url broken over two lines)
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2009/07/13-0
#comment-1249521
Yo baby, now that the kurds have ratified their own kurdish constitution, all hell will break loose as the sunni''s Baathists,Shiite's and the oil hungry imperialists, as well as the multimationals are all gonna make a GRAB for this tarbaby... oy vey,
Triple oy vey.... For any of you that may see the great parade of history through the poetic dimension, the Kurdish creation myth, the logos has a lot to say about this historical pileup.
Occidental historical "civlization" began in the great cosmopolitan city states of sumeria, and it may be poetic justice that history ends there as well.
Nineveh... the ghosts are whispering, Nineveh, the seven sermons of the dead are calling the fallen to witness the final acts of usery, extortion, debt, and fractional reserve banking.
What will we build temples to? after all the old foundations are exposed and blown to bits?
john masefield's 'cargoes'..................