BASRA, June 25, (Agencies): Iraq wants to open a special border crossing with neighbouring Kuwait for international oil firms working in Iraq, the head of state-run South Oil Co. (SOC) told Reuters on Friday.
The new border point will facilitate the inflow of equipment for the oil companies that secured contracts to develop Iraq’s oilfields, after complaints about the capacity of the country’s overwhelmed ports, SOC head Dhiya Jaafar said.
“There are repeated complaints from the international oil companies, which won contracts in the bidding rounds” about the work of the Iraqi ports, he said in an interview.
“A solution that has been put forward is to set up a border point with Kuwait in Northern Rumaila related to the oil companies.”
Jaafar said the proposal is being studied by Iraq’s oil, finance and interior ministries but also needs the approval of the Kuwaiti government.
Relations with Kuwait remain frosty two decades after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iraq’s small neighbour. Rumaila oilfield, the workhorse of Iraq’s oil sector and which is now being developed by oil major BP and China’s CNPC into what could be the world’s second most productive field, lies along Iraq’s border with Kuwait.
Iraq, in desperate need of cash to rebuild after years of war, economic sanctions and underinvestment, has opened its vast oil reserves and some untapped fields to global oil companies.
It struck major deals in two auctions last year in a bid to raise its production capacity to Saudi Arabian levels of 12 million bpd in seven years from 2.5 million bpd now.
Meanwhile, Iraqi Interior Minister Jawad Bolani set new rules on Friday restricting the right of assembly after bloody demonstrations across southern Iraq against draconian power rationing.
His ministry warned that any demonstration that led to violence in breach of the new regulations would face “known methods” of dispersal by police, which last weekend included live fire.
“Protest organisers must apply 72 hours in advance for authorisation from the interior minister and the provincial governor, and the demonstrations should be peaceful and non-violent,” the ministry said in a statement.
“Slogans should not incite confessional violence,” it added, referring to animosities between Iraq’s Shiite majority and the ousted Sunni Arab elite that resulted in sectarian conflict in 2006-2007 that killed tens of thousands of people.
“The party which seeks permission to organise a demonstration should be known.
“Organisers should specify how many demonstrators will take part, the time of the demonstration and the route any protest march will take,” the statement said.
“No firearms, even licensed one, will be allowed.
“If the demonstration turns to violence, then we will use the known methods to disperse the demonstrators,” the ministry added in a grim warning following the use of live fire by police to disperse protesters in the main southern city of Basra last Saturday.
The police action killed two demonstrators and wounded a third, after the protest turned angry in temperatures of 54 degrees Celsius (130 degrees Fahrenheit) and stones were hurled at provincial government offices.
Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani on Friday revoked electricity privileges enjoyed by government officials as he took temporary control of the power portfolio amid public fury over rationing.
Shahristani, a key ally of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, said his measures would redirect much-needed supplies to a national grid that currently provides ordinary citizens with power for only one hour in every five, or less.
“It is impossible for anyone who takes responsibility (for electricity) for a few days to end the suffering of the Iraqi people,” he told reporters at a news conference in Baghdad.
“But I have taken these measures to reduce the problems facing those who have a limited amount of electricity,” a situation that sparked a riot in the southern city of Basra on June 19 that saw two men shot dead by police.
Shahristani said he had ordered a stop to special supplies given to Iraqi officials living in the International Green Zone and elsewhere in the capital.
In another development, a bomb bomb on Friday damaged the perimeter wall of the Nabi Yunes mosque in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, revered by Christians as the burial place of the Biblical prophet Jonah, police said.
The explosion caused no casualties and the mosque itself was untouched, police said.
The large mosque, built on the site of an earlier church, sits on a hill that marks one of the two main settlement mounds of ancient Nineveh, in the eastern part of modern Mosul.
It lies not far from the surviving walls and gates of the great Assyrian city constructed at the turn of the 7th century BC.
The mosque’s current prayer leader, Sheikh Mohammed Abdul-Wahab Shammaa, is a follower of the mystic Sufi tradition of the Muslim faith which is anathema to hardline Islamists.
Mass grave
Police found a mass grave on Friday containing 11 skeletons they believe to be the remains of victims of sectarian bloodshed that swept Iraq in 2006 and 2007, an AFP correspondent reported.
The grave was found in the Helweh district, some 35 kilometres (around 20 miles) west of the mainly Sunni Arab city of Samarra where al-Qaeda militants attacked a revered Shiite shrine in 2006 and again in 2007, stoking communal violence that killed tens of thousands of people, the correspondent said.
Police said they believed the remains, found close to the arid shores of Lake Tharthar, had been buried three or four years ago, judging by their state of decomposition.
Al-Arabiya
The Baghdad offices of Al-Arabiya television closed on Friday after the interior ministry warned the Saudi-funded satellite network was under surveillance by insurgents, a staffer said.
“Interior ministry sources told us they had information that terrorist groups were closely watching the bureau in preparation for an attack,” the Al-Arabiya journalist told AFP, asking not to be identified.
“The management asked all staff — journalists and technicians — not to come to work today.”
Al-Arabiya’s headquarters in Dubai could not immediately be reached for comment.
But an Iraqi interior ministry official said: “There are terrorist threats” to the channel’s offices in the Al-Harthiyah area of west Baghdad. He did not elaborate.
The pan-Arab television channel has been no stranger to attack by suspected Sunni Arab insurgents or pressure from the Shiite-led government.