Trapped by war and politics

Alice Fordham

• Last Updated: October 24. 2009 3:05PM UAE / October 24. 2009 11:05AM GMT

KIRKUK // The hydrocarbon wealth in Kirkuk is visible to the naked eye. Gas bubbles out of the ground through oil fields and is burnt off in flames which locals say have been there for millennia and which colour the night sky orange.

But although the Kirkuk oilfield holds at least 8.5 billion barrels of oil, extraction is well below capacity, equipment dates from the 1940s and a combination of corruption, terrorism and the threat of ethnosectarian violence is making investors steer clear.

American and Iraqi authorities this week held an investment conference in Washington DC to encourage developers and investors to look into Iraq. But despite the country’s vast natural resources, bad security and an unpredictable government still outweigh the benefits to most investors, postponing the economic stability that impoverished, volatile areas like Kirkuk so desperately need.

Meanwhile, Kirkuk city, sitting on around 0.7 per cent of the world’s proven oil reserves, has no functioning sewer, no rubbish collection and a huge unemployment problem that fuels extremism in the province.

“This area is like treasure for everyone, but not for the Kirkuk people,” said Waseem Ramiz, 33, a local government employee. There was, he said, no infrastructure or basic standard of living, despite the city’s huge potential. Investors were deterred, he said, because Kirkuk was not a “nice area”.

American soldiers, who still operate in the province, are keen to emphasise that security here has, as in the rest of Iraq, improved immensely since the bloodletting of 2006-2008.

“Effective attacks remain about constant,” said Col Ryan F Gonsalves, a brigade commander. He said that car bombings, suicide attacks and small arms fire did still happen but “the people of Kirkuk think that security is stable”.

This kind of stability, however, is not enough for oil companies looking to invest.

“Right now there is security, but there is not predictability, and you have got to have predictability if you are going to invest hundreds of millions of dollars over a 10-year period,” said a western adviser working in Kirkuk.

Smuggling, for example, is an ongoing problem, with corruption in the forces guarding pipelines blamed for the ease with which they are punctured and fuel siphoned off.

And then there was the much-touted national auction of contracts to invest in oilfields which was supposed to be telelvised, was delayed by sandstorms and then featured surprise last-minute demands by the government.

LTC Hugh R McNeely, the deputy commanding officer of forward operating base Warrior, said in northern Iraq, not just Kirkuk, “production could be more than one million barrels a day”, while it currently stands at around 700,000.

“There is new technology which the Iraqi government doesn’t have,” he said, adding that they can only currently drill downwards. To reach other areas, they need to master slanted and sideways drilling, which they cannot do without foreign investment. New infrastructure, too, is desperately needed to enable refining and export.

But in Kirkuk, it is ethnic disputes as well as simmering tensions from groups like al Qa’eda that make its future unpredictable.

The central Baghdad government and the leaders of the autonomous region of Kurdistan are locked in dispute over the fate of Kirkuk. Both sides claim the city should be on their side of the border, with Jalal Talabani, the president of Iraq and a Kurd, referring to it as “Kurdistan’s Jerusalem”. A long-promised census which would establish the numbers of Kurds and Arabs in the area, preliminary to a referendum, has just been postponed indefinitely, sparking fury among Kurds.

Although Kirkuk is initially an unprepossessing city, heavy on dust and poverty, the ancient citadel rising above the battered town centre symbolises its long history. Shop signs are in Kurdish, Turkoman and Arabic and the mountainous landscape, which wrinkles like a blanket as the road runs north from Baghdad, sets it apart from the plains of south Iraq.

While Arabs are outraged at Kurdish claims to the city, it is understandable that some see it as an ethnic mixture and “special case”; even more so because of its oil wealth. As one MP from the Turkoman ethnic minority said, “what Kirkuk has makes everyone willing to put their hands in it”.

Recent political skirmishes in the city have come as Arab-Kurd tension has risen all along the border with the Kurdistan region, in areas which the Kurdish security force – the peshmerga – moved into after the American invasion in 2003.

Leaders in a disputed border area on the Ninewah plain have threatened to secede from Baghdad’s control, and Iraqi and Kurdish security forces have had to negotiate tense incidents as each has tried to move into territory controlled by the other. A Pentagon representative described the American military as “very nervous” about the situation.

Sheikh Abdullah Sami , an Arab member of the Kirkuk provincial council, blamed Kurdish forces for attacks, saying: “So many accidents have been done in Arab neighbourhoods, we believe that the Kurds were behind it, or paying terrorists.”

Rekaut Saber Hussein, 22, who lives in the Arfa neighbourhood, said he feared violence would break out between Arabs and Kurds.

“In Arfa, there are 40 houses which are all Kurdish and a lot of people who live there are Arabs, and every day they nearly fight. Eight months ago, my brother, my friend and my cousin got in a fight with Arabs and they were put in jail for three months.”

He said security in Kirkuk was “nothing” and that, “one and a half months ago, I went downtown with my little brother and passed a car, which exploded five minutes later. My friend died.”

Unlike most other cities in Iraq, where local security forces have largely chosen to work without American assistance since the June 30 withdrawal of American forces in urban areas, both Kurds and Arabs in Kirkuk said that American presence was necessary for peacekeeping.

Gen Khatab Omar Arif, the commander of an emergency response unit of the Iraqi police, said militants are often sheltered by the community, but assessed the security situation as “pretty much good”.

“We need coalition forces in Iraq … we still need time to get good Iraqi forces in Kirkuk.” Gen Khatab is Kurdish, and although as a member of the Iraqi police he takes orders from the central Baghdad authorities, when asked about Kirkuk’s status, he was unequivocal.

“Be sure the Kurdish people will keep fighting for Kirkuk,” he said. “Look at history, they have been fighting for it for a long time … so believe me, Kirkuk will be part of Kurdistan and it will be soon.”



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