Iraq Oil Report

Plus:
*Latest on the Turkish incursion into northern Iraq
*Iraq oil experts meet in Paris
*Electricity workers, ministry agree to talk after sit-ins
*The Iraq Press Roundup
*Much, much more…

(Editor’s Note: Apologies to Iraq Oil Report’s subscribers who have received messages in triplicate over the past two days. IOR has resolved a problem with the host and this isn’t expected again. Thanks for your understanding.)

Iraq, Turkey and the United States will hold talks on energy issues March 1 in Istanbul, a day before an energy working group of Iraq’s neighbors meet. Murat Karagoz, first counselor at the Turkish Embassy in Washington, confirmed the meeting Tuesday, Ben Lando reports for United Press International. “To transport Iraqi natural gas to international markets is of great strategic importance,” he said.

Iraq’s government says the Turkish incursion is a violation of its sovereignty and calls for a withdrawal, Michael Kamber reports for The New York Times. Turkey sent troops into northern Iraq, part of the semiautonomous Kurdistan Regional Government’s territory, late last week. Their target is the PKK, or the Kurdistan Workers Party, a separatist group that kills people in the name of Kurdish rights. Turkey, which is the site for the killings, is slowly getting around to recognizing the rights of Kurds in its country.

Oil prices settled near $100 a barrel Tuesday. Although threats of an OPEC production decrease and the weakening dollar are also to blame, the Turkish incursion is as well. Well, at least it’s giving speculators and traders a reason to hike prices.

The incursion is not near northern Iraq’s oil production, which is nearly exclusive to Kirkuk just south of the KRG territory. Nor is it near the pipeline sending crude to Turkey, pumping at about 350,000 barrels per day. But military action is likely to strain relations between Turkey and Iraq’s Kurds, let alone Baghdad. Turkey benefits from its trade with Iraq, which is concentrated in the KRG, and if the Kurds are to produce any sizeable amounts of oil, they will need Turkish OK to export it.

Muqtada al-Sadr, the powerful Shiite cleric and leader of the Sadr Movement political party and Mahdi Army militia, has appealed to Turkey’s Muslim leaders and goodwill to end the siege, The Associated Press reports.

Turkey’s Today’s Zaman reports the invasion will end after the PKK bases in the Qandil Mountains are destroyed. The article says the border is being secured and then onto the mountain bases. It also says Baghdad and Washington were told the PKK is the sole target. Kurds, especially, say it’s about Kirkuk, the oil-rich northern town that is in dispute. The KRG wants it back in their territory, claiming Saddam Hussein ripped it from its historic Kurdish roots. Turkey, backing the ethnically related Turkomen who side with Iraqi Arabs in keeping Kirkuk from the KRG, fears Iraqi Kurdistan will become more powerful, even perhaps declare independence, and embolden its own Kurdish population.

National Security Advisor Muwaffaq al-Rubaie warned that the longer Turkey stays, the more likely the Peshmerga, the Kurds’ skilled security forces, will address the situation themselves, Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic.

U.S. coverage of the conflict has been pretty weak, as University of Michigan Middle East expert Juan Cole points out on his website, Informed Comment. He publishes the coverage of Aljazeera English as proof its possible. (Note: Informed Comment is also the source of the above Rubaie scoop.)

Iraq oil experts are meeting in Paris in a somewhat secretive event, which Iraq Oil Report is told is closed to media. The Voices of Iraq news agency has a quick summary, including participants: “Mahdi al-Hafiz, Iraq’s former minister of planning and a member of parliament; Qusai Abdul Wahhab, a parliamentarian; Thamir al-Ghadban, a senior advisor to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki; Adnan al-Mufti, the speaker of the Kurdish parliament; Ashti Hourami, the minister of natural resources in the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG); Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, the former minister of oil; Fouad Hussein, the head of the KRG’s presidency office; in addition to several researchers, including Fadil al-Jalbi, Muhammad Ali Zeini and Tareq Shafiq.”

“The idea of the conference stems from the need to hold systematic discussions on the Iraqi oil issue, especially in the aftermath of the emergence of a new liberal trend that dominated the country in the past five years, believing that the only way to democracy is to reduce the role of the state,” Dr. Haidar Saeed, a member of the Iraqi Research Center executive board, which co-sponsored the summit with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.
Editor’s Note: A previous edition of this post said the meeting was sponsored by the French oil firm Total. According to new information, Total is not involved.

Iraq’s electricity sector workers say a sit-in last week resulted in the power minister’s agreement to discuss their demands, UPI reports. Workers in Iraq’s Nasiriyah power station staged a sit-in, demanding the Electricity Ministry do more to help them keep the plant in operation, the Badr Newspaper reports. According to a statement by the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions, sit-ins also took place in Basra, Hilla, Musayab and Kut, organized by the Union of Engineering technicians of the Federation of Workers’ Councils and Union in Iraq.

The Electricity Ministry, meanwhile, is asking the federal government for more funds for projects, and is criticizing the international business community for not bidding on contracts.

An Iraq Oil Report MUST READ

The Myth of the Surge: Hoping to turn enemies into allies, U.S. forces are arming Iraqis who fought with the insurgents. But it’s already starting to backfire. A report from the front lines of the new Iraq, Nir Rosen reports for Rolling Stone, on a story for which he got incredible access to U.S. and Iraqi security forces and the militias.

Patrick Cockburn reports in The Independent on increasing sectarian violence in the rest of the country.

“A suicide bomber detonated an explosive belt in a tent filled with Shia pilgrims walking to one of their holiest shrines south of Baghdad, killing at least 40 of them and wounding 60.

The attack shows that al-Qa’ida has restarted its bombings of Shia Iraqis, whom it sees as heretics, and remains capable of launching numerous suicide attacks on the same day in different parts of Iraq.

The claim by the US military of a significant drop in violence in Iraq is being dented by a rise in sectarian killings and by the Turkish invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan last Thursday in pursuit of Turkish Kurd PKK guerrillas. …”

The U.S. Army typically commissions a sort of lessons learned report of its activity, called the “After-Action Review.” The current Iraq War was no different except not only was the classified report kept behind closed doors, but a review for academics and journalists has been hidden as well, McClatchy Newspapers military columnist Joseph L. Galloway reports.

“Both versions of the volume of the report titled ”Rebuilding Iraq” are locked in the same vault, where they can do no good in educating officers or the American public to the realities that led to a near-catastrophic failure by both the military and civilians to plan for what would happen after we toppled Saddam Hussein’s government and as sumed control of a fractured, feuding nation of 25 million people.

The trouble, it seems, was that RAND’s team of more than 50 civilian and military researchers followed the trail of the failure from the Army’s part of the Pentagon to former Defense Secretary Donald L. Rumsfeld’s offices and on to the White House and State Department and elsewhere in the Bush administration. …”

A review of Iraq’s editorial pages, the Iraq Press Roundup by UPI’s Hiba Dawood.
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