Iraq Oil Report

Plus:
*Egypt sends Oil Minister for cooperation talks
*Missan province oil products depot is underway
*Turkey restarts northern Iraq bombings after PKK attack
*Iraq’s brightest stars can’t shine in their homeland
*Hakim starts campaigning
*Iraq Press Roundup

Iraq’s Kurdistan region is producing gas from projects signed with partners Dana Gas and Crescent. Gas is being piped to local power plants at 75 million cubic feet per day, a rate that will grow as domestic power capacity grows, the companies said in a statement.

Egypt’s Oil Minster was part of a quick diplomatic visit to Iraq, Mohammed Abbas reports for Reuters.

A project to construct an oil depot in the province of Missan at a cost of nearly $40 million has been referred to a local company, the director of the province’s oil products department said, Voices of Iraq reports. The depot has a capacity to store 90,000 cubic meters of oil, the director explained. The Oil Projects Company had built oil reservoirs in the area of al-Barzakan and in the provinces of Muthanna and Karbala.

Iraq too dangerous for many professionals, Tina Susman writes for the Los Angeles Times. The brain drain continues as doctors, professors, engineers and other well-educated, affluent or secular Iraqis flee or stay away, nervous about kidnappings and random violence.

Alive in Baghdad: Iraqis Teach Against The Odds
The ongoing conflict in Baghdad has made a strong impact on the teachers and the education system in Iraq. A large number of teachers left their schools due to the threat of being killed or kidnapped by a gang to be ransomed. In other cases teachers and professors have been threatened or killed by militias or insurgent groups.

Read what Iraqis read: the Iraq Press Roundup by UPI’s Alaa Majeed.

Iraqi, Iraqi-Kurdish and Turkish officials condemn the latest PKK attack on Turkish troops in weekend calls, Today’s Zaman reports. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani proposed a high-level security meeting between the two states. The attack came ahead of a critical vote in the Turkish Parliament on a new proposal to extend another year-long mandate giving military authorization for cross-border operations against PKK bases in northern Iraq.

Meanwhile, Turkey has begun bombing suspected PKK bases in northern Iraq, The Associated Press reports.

For a dissection of circumstances leading up to the attack and the next steps for Turkey, read Gareth Jenkins’ latest in The Jamestown Foundation’s Eurasia Daily Monitor.

Rising Iraqi Shiite leader Ammar al-Hakim has extended an olive branch to rival Sunni leaders and tribes during a whistlestop tour of Sunni enclaves ahead of key provincial elections, Agence France-Presse reports.

Shiite Iraqi lawmakers said Monday the matter of minority representation in the provincial elections law will be put on the next parliamentary agenda, UPI reports.

The Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq issued a follow-up statement to appeals made to the U.S. Treasury Department’s decision to freeze its assets, UPI reports.

U.S. representatives for the Kurdish government Monday offered a rebuttal to comparisons between the president of Iraqi Kurdistan and Yasser Arafat, UPI reports.

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