Fuel shortages continue in the north

While celebrations following news of the capture of Saddam Hussein offer temporary relief, the everyday problems confronting the Iraqi people continue to take their toll. A severe petrol shortage in the northern city of Dahuk has seen people waiting hours at a time to get fuel, and the sprouting of a flourishing black market. Queues of vehicles have stretched for over a kilometre in recent weeks as petrol stations have run dry. "I have been waiting here five hours today - of course I’m angry. I’m 61 and I don’t need this - it hurts me a lot," one motorist, Ahmad Burhan Burhan al-Din, told IRIN in Dahuk as he queued to fill his small truck at one of only two government-owned petrol stations in the city. He could get petrol on the black market, but said it was expensive and often mixed with water. Ahmad said nobody really understood the reasons for the shortages, but it was crazy that in a city only an hour's drive from the oilfields of Mosul, drivers had to spend so much time waiting to get fuel for travel and deliveries. Iraq has the world’s second-largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia, with about 10 percent of the planet’s oil under its soil. But damage to and decay of refineries and oil infrastructure have spelt continuing shortages for residents. The US government has estimated it will cost US $1.9 billion to restore the country’s oilfields, where production remains below pre-war levels. Much Iraqi crude oil is currently sent north to Turkey, where it is refined into petrol, kerosene and diesel and then trucked back to northern Iraq via the Silopi/Zakho border. Recently, a fall in the number of trucks making that crossing has brought about shortages. However, petrol is available if you are prepared to pay for it. At the privately owned Belend station on Dahuk’s outskirts, Uthman Sa'id said he was about to spend 15 times more than usual to fill up the small truck he used to make a living transporting fruit and vegetables. Normally, at a government-owned station, he would pay five Iraqi dinars (about 40 US cents) for a tank of petrol. He had queued for two days trying to get fuel at both such stations, but each time it had run out before he got to the front of the line. So he had been forced to come to the private station, where filling up was going to cost him 75 dinars. "If I wait in line all day, I can’t work. But if I don’t have petrol I can’t work either - so what am I meant to do?" he told IRIN. At the privately owned station, he only has to wait about an hour to get fuel, but the extra cost angers him. "All my life we have problems: Saddam problem, war problem - now petrol problem.” Khalid Abd al-Jalil said he would normally pay 10 dinars to fill his passenger bus, but today he would be paying 110 dinars just to continue working. "It makes me so angry - I am ready to explode. People are almost ready to kill each other with this problem," he told IRIN. He blamed smuggling of oil from Iraq across its many international borders as a reason for the shortages in Dahuk. One of the private station’s owners, Ibrahim Husayn, defended the high prices he charged, saying he was trying to help local people during the shortage by obtaining fuel tankers from Turkey. But the supply to Dahuk was irregular and some days he ran out by the afternoon despite rationing customers to 22 litres each. He too blamed the shortages on smuggling, as well as damage to the oil pipelines to Turkey, and insecurity, which was hampering the repair of Iraq’s own oil refineries. The answer was to produce more oil and petrol in Iraq rather than rely on importing it from neighbouring countries, he said. "But this will take time, and at the moment there is no real answer," Ibrahim told IRIN. But the manager of oil products at the Dahuk Governorate, Mahmud Muhammad Salim Ba Lata, told IRIN the problems would hopefully be solved shortly. Reliable fuel supplies had begun to arrive from Turkey, and the Coalition Provisional Authority in Mosul had assured him that agreements were being signed to increase the amount of petrol imported from countries such as Syria. He said the Bayji refinery north of Baghdad was also increasing production and, when fully operational, it would be able to supply all the fuel needs of northern Iraq. Mahmud denied that smuggling was a problem, saying the shortages were simply a result of insufficient supplies arriving from Turkey. Other stations charging high prices were obtaining their fuel from the black market, he asserted, but the stations owned by the Kurdish government would not increase prices. The problem had got worse in Dahuk during the last two weeks, he said, but in other areas of the north it had been going on for a month. However if adequate supplies continued to arrive from Turkey, the long queues of frustrated motorists would vanish within three days, he predicted.