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US Vice President Cheney and Iraqi
Kurdistan leaders Meet About Oil
1.12.2007
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December 1, 2007
WASHINGTON, -- Vice President Cheney met on
Friday with two senior leaders from the regional
government in Kurdistan region in 'northern Iraq'
who have been wooing U.S. oil companies despite
earlier State Department criticism of Kurdish
leaders for signing oil and gas exploration deals.
Cheney's office said that the vice president met
with Omer Fattah Hussain, deputy prime minister of
the Kurdistan Regional Government, and Ashti
Abdullah Hawrami, the regional minister of oil and
natural resources.
For more than a year, the Bush administration has
been pressing Iraqi leaders to agree on a national
petroleum law, seeing it as an important step toward
uniting different regions.
In September, State Department officials called the
Washington representatives of major oil companies to
discourage them from signing deals with the
Kurdistan regional government,www.ekurd.net
which adopted its own
petroleum law in August.
Advisers to the Iraqi Kurds said yesterday that they
saw the meetings that Kurdish officials had with
Cheney and with Reuben Jeffery, undersecretary of
state for economic, energy and agricultural affairs,
as signs of a change in U.S. attitudes.
"This is the first really high-level engagement for
a long time and certainly since the oil law was
started," said Jonathan Morrow, an adviser to the
Kurdistan Regional Government. "Far from the U.S.
taking it as an opportunity to lean on the Kurds and
ask them to withdraw from their position on Iraqi
federalism in the oil sector, they're brainstorming
with the Kurds on how to break the impasse in
Baghdad."
Kurdish authorities signed a dozen oil and gas
exploration contracts in November, bringing to 20
the total number of contracts signed.
Shares of DNO Asa, a Norwegian oil company that
entered an exploration agreement with Kurdistan
regional authorities in 2005,www.ekurd.net
jumped 13 percent
yesterday in Oslo after the firm reported
encouraging production tests and raised reserve
estimates in its exploration bloc in Kurdistan
'northern Iraq'.
washingtonpost com
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