The struggle for Iraq's oil flares up as Kurds open doors to foreign investors

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2143141,00.html

The struggle for Iraq's oil flares up as Kurds open doors to foreign investors

Baghdad is trying to reassert central control of reserves run by Kurdish authorities

Michael Howard in Taq Taq
Tuesday August 7, 2007
The Guardian

At the end of a rough dirt track, on a sun-baked hillock once the domain of scorpions and snakes, squats an odd settlement of caravans, generators and drilling rigs that is at the heart of the battle for Iraq's oil.

"Welcome to Texas, Kurdistan," said Karim Ali, as his taxi bounced to the gates of the Taq Taq oilfields, on the undulating plains of Koi Sanjaq, some 80 miles south-east of Irbil. "Soon we'll all have big hats and cigars like them," he said, nodding at a group of oil workers passing by on a pickup truck.

Like many Iraqis, Karim appeared convinced that the country's vast reserves of crude, the bedrock of its economy, were about to be siphoned off by major US oil corporations. The presence of "foreigners" here at Taq Taq merely cemented his certainty.

With the Bush administration pressing the Iraqi government to pass a new hydrocarbons law, there are widely voiced assumptions that it will bulldoze the oil industry into privatisation, and that foreign firms - meaning US ones - will unfairly reap the rewards. A survey published yesterday by a group of British and American NGOs suggested most Iraqis oppose plans to open the oilfields to foreign investment.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2143141,00.html