Plus:
*Oil Ministry to explain oil and gas bidding to companies in London next month
*Karbala sees 13 power projects
*Finance Ministry agrees to worker demands
*Recap of weekend violence highlights troubled future
*Artists transform the blast walls
*Exploring Al-Qaida in Iraq and the Awakening’s fate
*Much more

A bomb blast on an oil pipeline last Wednesday was the cause of a halt in Iraq’s northern oil exports since then, but flows should resume in the next 24 hours, the North Oil Company said, Ahmed Rasheed reports for Reuters.

Oil exports have dropped dramatically in recent days, to about 900,000 barrels per day, which means exports from the south have been hampered as well, though the cause is not known.

Read more on pipeline security in this June 13 article by United Press International’s Ben Lando.

The Associated Press is reporting dust storms prevented northern production.

International oil companies bidding on Iraqi oil and gas fields will meet with top Oil Ministry officials next month in London, Ahmed Rasheed reports for Reuters. At the Oct. 13 London meeting, Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani will unveil the model contracts, which the oil deals will be based on, as well as release of technical details the companies will need to bid for and, if chosen, develop the fields. Reuters reports the oil fields up for grabs are Rumaila, Kirkuk, Zubair, West Qurna 1, Bai Hassan and Maysan (Bazargan, Abu Gharab and Fakka) and the Akkas and Mansuriyah gas fields. A second set of fields will be bidded on later this year or early next year.

Thirteen electricity projects have been scheduled for implementation in the holy Shiite city of Karbala at a cost of over one million dollars, the city’s mayor said on Saturday, Voices of Iraq reports.

Iran and Iraq will establish three free trade zones along their borders, the Tehran Times reports, with a special focus on fuel and energy sectors.

Iraqi workers and the Ministry of Finance have reached a tentative deal following wage cuts and other moves that prompted worker protests. According to U.S. Labor Against the War, a U.S. based union group which works closely with Iraq’s workers: “the Iraqi government reversed its order to cut wages by up to 30% and eliminate many industrial labor benefits. The authorities agreed to direct negotiations with the representatives of the workers.”

Iraq does not need any financial aid from the United States, the government spokesman said, in the wake of criticism from some U.S. politicians that Washington is paying too much towards Iraq’s reconstruction, Mohammed Abbas reports for Reuters. Ali al-Dabbagh was rebutting criticism leveled by members of U.S. Congress that the United States has paid enough in Iraq reconstruction and other costs. Iraq has actually paid more for reconstruction than the United States, and there are questions as to how much of the U.S. $48 billion was not misspent or gone missing altogether, let alone the usefulness of the projects paid for.

America and Al Qaida: Filmmakers David Enders and Rick Rawley explore the Sawha, or Awakening, and its role in fighting Al Qaida.

Roundup of violence that foreshadows in Iraq:

At least 31 people were killed and 60 wounded in a car bomb attack on Friday in the center of the predominantly Shiite town of Dujail, north of Baghdad, according to Iraqi police officers in Dujail and in the provincial capital, Tikrit, Sam Dagher reports for The New York Times. A policeman in Dujail, about 35 miles north of Baghdad in Salahuddin, a mainly Sunni Arab province, described a scene of mayhem and destruction that had become less common as violence had dropped countrywide in recent months. In another attack on Shiites on Friday, two people were killed and 12 were wounded when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives-laden vest among prayergoers in the town of Sinjar in the northern province of Nineveh, the American military said. Sinjar lies in an area of the north that is disputed by Kurds, Sunni Arabs and a Kurdish-speaking sect known as Yazidis.

Eight Kurdish pesh merga soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing in a disputed part of eastern Diyala Province on Saturday, adding to tensions with the Iraqi government and local Arabs over the Kurds’ presence in the area, Dagher reports in a separate article for The Times. Among the dead in the bombing, in the town of Khanaqin, was the senior pesh merga commander for the area, according to the local police chief, Col. Azad Issa. The bomb, which went off as the Kurdish force was patrolling.

Strip of Iraq ‘on the Verge of Exploding’, Amit R. Paley reports for The Washington Post. Kurdish leaders have expanded their authority over a roughly 300-mile-long swath of territory beyond the borders of their autonomous region in northern Iraq, stationing thousands of soldiers in ethnically mixed areas in what Iraqi Arabs see as an encroachment on their homelands.

Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, a Kurd, met with powerful non-political Shiite leader Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani at his home in Najaf, Mina Al-Oraibi reports for Asharq Alawsat, to discuss the heightened tension between the Kurdish and Shiite led parties leading Iraq’s government.

A Sunni Arab leader of a citizen patrol group in Baghdad who had been a proponent of reconciliation in his neighborhood was assassinated over the weekend, Sam Dagher reports for The New York Times. The killing of the leader, Fouad Ali Hussein al-Douri, a Sunni mosque imam who directed a group of about 65 guards in the Jihad neighborhood in western Baghdad, is the latest in a string of attacks on members of the so-called Awakening Councils. Relations between the Awakening Councils and the Shiite-led government have become increasingly strained.

Iraq: Violence is down – but not because of America’s ’surge,’ Patrick Cockburn writes in The Independent. If fewer US troops and Iraqis are being killed, it is only because the Shia community and Iran now dominate.

The Murder of Gift Givers in Iraq, by McClatchy’s Nicholas Spangler and Hussein Kadhim:

The Iraqi TV crew brought the gifts that had come to be the trademark of their reality show: some basic household appliances and a delicious supper to break the Ramadan fast for a family of little means.

They’d done it many times before. But this episode didn’t get made. Gunmen seized four of them from their vehicles, hauled them down the street and executed them.

The show is called Your Iftar on Us, after the Arabic word for the evening feast, and it airs on the privately-owned Sharqiya network. It didn’t have much in the way of production values but it had a wide following. People watched it because it made them feel good.

“The people were so happy to see us,” said the host, a young woman named Farida Adel. She was speaking Saturday, hours after everything went bad, when Sharqiya broke into its regularly scheduled programming and showed her alone on the screen. “All of them invited us inside their houses. They were so happy that we’d come to Mosul,” she said.

The Bush administration is pushing through a broad array of foreign weapons deals as it seeks to rearm Iraq and Afghanistan, contain North Korea and Iran, and solidify ties with onetime Russian allies, Eric Lipton reports for The New York Times. From tanks, helicopters and fighter jets to missiles, remotely piloted aircraft and even warships, the Department of Defense has agreed so far this fiscal year to sell or transfer more than $32 billion in weapons and other military equipment to foreign governments, compared with $12 billion in 2005.

Iraqi artists turn concrete blast walls into murals of hope in this power point presentation.

Parliament on Sunday suspended legal immunity for secular Sunni lawmaker Mithal Alusi, opening him up to possible felony charges for traveling to Israel last week to participate in an international counterterrorism conference, Nicholas Spangler and Mohammed al Dulaimy report for McClatchy Newspapers.

More than 12,000 Iraqi refugees have been admitted into the United States this fiscal year, according to a press release from the State Dept. and Dept. of Homeland Security.
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