Iraq Oil Report

There is one Iraq, but there are also two: the northern, potentially oil-rich region controlled by Iraq’s Kurds, and the rest of Iraq. That, says the Kurdish liaison to U.N. efforts in Iraqi Kurdistan, is how the international community should view it.

“We say Iraq could not be treated as one simple state,” said Dindar Zebari, the Kurdistan Regional Government’s chief coordinator for U.N. activities. “The Republic of Iraq is not only the ministers in Baghdad. We have ministers in Irbil” — the regional capital — “which are sovereign, independent in terms of their policies and in terms of their areas of support.”

Zebari, in an interview with United Press International in the KRG’s Washington office, explained the KRG’s view of its status in Iraq, which he said is being largely supported by the United Nations. Baghdad, however, is a different story.

“The problem in Baghdad is the mentality that has to accept that Iraq is composed of different structures,” he said.

Read the whole story of my interview with Zebari HERE.

The Battle for Basra

Basra, where most of Iraq’s oil is located and sent to market, used to be a bastion of cosmopolitan, educated, forward moving Iraq. Now religious authorities, militias, smugglers and gangs have taken hold.

The head of the provincial council says security committees the government has set up in Basra refuse to cooperate with the provincial police forces. These committees have troops and National Guard corps at their disposal, Abed Battat reports for Azzaman.Meantime, the disparate militia groups have carved out their own ‘fiefdoms’ where irregular gunmen impose their interpretation of law and order and even have imposed a crude system of taxation.

In a second article, Battat reports The police forces charged with security in Basra are no match to the heavily armed militia groups in the southern city, Basra’s police chief said.

From Informed Comment, by Juan Cole:

The police chief of Basra, told the al-Arabiya satellite news channel on Wednesday that a shadowy group calling itself “Commanding the Good and Forbidding what is Prohibited” has recently killed 50 women in the southern port. It is probably a puritanical Shiite group, and it says it objects to make-up (tabarruj or the wanton display of oneself in public). The women killed have been for the most part Muslims (both Sunni and Shiite), though two were Christians.

Sudarsan Raghavan reports on the power struggle between Muqtada al-Sadr’s political/militia faction and that of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim’s Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq:

Today, their struggle is multidimensional, playing out along lines of personality, class and ideology. The contest is a street fight over turf, a tug of war over oil revenues and a battle for control of the shrines. Sadr’s militia has targeted Hakim’s party offices and fought his movement’s armed wing, the Badr Organization. Both militias are widely believed to have operated death squads targeting each other and Sunnis.

Deal making: Kurds and Sunnis, Kurds and Kurds

IraqSlogger.com picks up on the Iraqi media’s take on a deal reportedly reached between the Kurdish political leadership in Iraq and Sunni Arabs. The two have been at odds over the extent of a powerful central government in running the country, especially when it comes to the oil.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and KRG President Massoud Barzani, both Kurds and leaders of the two largest Kurdish parties in Iraq, are meeting to discuss relations between the regional and federal governments, the Voices of Iraq news agency reports.

Also note, however, that the formation of the Kurds’ coalition agreement called for a switching of power roles between the two parties, right about now.

I say journalist; You say terrorist

A Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer for The Associated Press is accused by the Pentagon for being a terrorist, and IraqSlogger.com is all over the story of Bilal Hussein.

While the truth of the matter should be the ultimate test of whether the allegations are true, the case is being handled with a Gestapo’s touch.
From the IraqSlogger report:

• Under strong pressure from the U.S. military, the investigating judge closed the case and imposed a gag order. This was requested principally because the U.S. military was concerned about unfavorable media coverage. The Pentagon media strategy involves leaking information as it finds convenient to “friendly new media” (this I take to be wingnut bloggers), but restricting the flow of information to traditional media. The Iraqi judge is fully cooperating with his gag order.

• The U.S. military has assigned a team of five to act effectively as prosecutors in the case. The team is headed by a JAG Captain named Kelvey (or perhaps Calvey). (Says the source: “We recognize, of course, that the U.S. has no authority to prosecute a case in an Iraqi court. That’s one of the reasons that a gag order was essential.”)

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