Winston Churchill’s map of Iraq ready to unravel over oil
Winston Churchill understood the significance of the black stuff seeping to the surface in the Kurdish plains of Mesopotamia when he included the region within Iraq as the British forged the country in the 1920s. In doing so, Churchill, the colonial secretary at the time, set in train almost a century of bickering between the Iraqi […]Winston Churchill understood the significance of the black stuff seeping to the surface in the Kurdish plains of Mesopotamia when he included the region within Iraq as the British forged the country in the 1920s. In doing so, Churchill, the colonial secretary at the time, set in train almost a century of bickering between the Iraqi government and its Kurdish enclave over the area’s estimated 45 billion barrels of crude.
While their latest dispute was temporarily resolved last month to help finance the struggle against ISIL, the accord has not addressed differences between administrations in Baghdad and Erbil that include the future of Kirkuk, northern Iraq’s main oil hub. The Iraqi government started pumping crude from Kirkuk through Kurdish pipes that bypass militant-held territory to Turkey, Iraq’s Almada newspaper reported on January 1.
