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Iran Interferes in Iraqi Kurdistan
2.12.2011
By Stephen Schwartz, The Weekly Standard |
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December 2, 2011
Iranian president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad will
travel soon to
the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) for a
discussion of border disputes and trade relations,
reports the Iraqi news agency Aswat al-Iraq.
Ahmadinejad will meet with KRG president Massoud
Barzani, who visited Tehran at the end of October
with a delegation of KRG ministers and governors.
Barzani, as pointed out in The Weekly Standart by
Frederick W. Kagan, Kim Kagan, and Marisa Cochrane
Sullivan, was considered previously “the Kurdish
leader most staunchly opposed to Iran.” In Tehran,
Barzani and Iranian foreign minister Ali Akbar
Salehi announced that Kurdish rebel |
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actions against
Iran, along the border with the KRG, had ended.
Iran is looking for auxiliaries to its considerable
and menacing influence over the Iraqi central
government, perhaps out of mere desire for
aggrandizement. But Tehran may also fear that Arab
Shias in Baghdad will prove a troublesome partner in
its anticipated alliance of Shia-ruled Middle East
states, once the U.S. leaves. Iraq's Shias, a
majority of the country’s population, do not accept
the political model of the Iranian clerical state,
or “vilayet-e faqih” (governance by religious
jurists). Hostility between Iranian and Iraqi Arab
Shias, as described by Nathaniel Rabkin writing for
THE WEEKLY STANDARD in 2007, is reflected in
religious literature produced by Iraq’s Shia
religious authorities, or marjae. And of course the
Iraq-Iran war of 1980-88 has not been forgotten.
An AP report in early November quoted a 36-year-old
Iraqi Shia sheep trader, Fouad Karim, who lives in
Mandali, a mixed Kurdish and Arab town on the
northeastern border with Iran: “We hated the
Iranians. And there are still bad feelings. The
government should not tolerate any Iranian
interference, as our anger against them only gets
worse when we hear about their deeds.” Still, as the
AP noted, multitudes of Iranian pilgrims have gone
to the Shia holy sites at Kerbala and Najaf in Iraq,
and Iranian-produced consumer goods are offered for
sale widely in Iraq.
While Iran no doubt hopes to aggravate tensions
between Iraq's Kurds and Baghdad, it has a poor
history of dealing with its own Kurds, including
terrorist attacks on Kurdish leaders abroad, and
shelling of Kurds on Iraqi soil in July. But Iran
already operates two consulates in the KRG, in Erbil
and in Sulaimaniyah. Iran may also want to exploit
Kurdish tensions with Turkey, since the latter
country entered the NATO anti-missile defense
system. Iran has threatened to retaliate against
Turkey if the U.S. or Israel act against Iran’s
nuclear ambitions.
The new Iranian intrigues in the KRG began just as
animosity between the Kurds in Erbil and the
government in Baghdad had worsened over
petrochemical production, including in Kirkuk, which
has prolific oilfields. Baghdad argues that
hydrocarbons from the KRG belong to the whole Iraqi
nation. The most recent Quarterly Report to Congress
by the Special Inspector General for Iraq
Reconstruction (SIGIR),www.ekurd.net
dated October 30, 2011, counts KRG contracts with
more than 40 international oil and gas companies.
SIGIR offers a comparison of 45 billion barrels of
oil and 100-200 trillion cubic feet of natural gas
said by the KRG to be available in its territory
with estimates by Baghdad of 143 billion barrels of
oil and 112 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in
Iraq as a whole.
The largest number of oil and gas agreements with
the KRG have involved investors from Canada (14
licenses) and South Korea (12 licenses), with
U.S.-based enterprises accounting for 8 licenses.
Other interested parties are based in Kurdistan
itself, Turkey, Britain, the United Arab Emirates,
Austria, Hungary, Norway, China, Australia, India,
France, Russia, Moldova, and Spain. In February
2011, thanks to an interim agreement with Baghdad,
the KRG resumed exporting oil, which had stopped in
2009.
Firms investing in the KRG’s energy potential were
typically small (except for the Chinese SINOPEC and
Spanish Repsol), until ExxonMobil became the first
“supermajor” firm to announce, at the end of
October, that it had signed accords with the KRG for
oil and gas exploration at six locations. The
Baghdad government responded angrily, claiming that
ExxonMobil acted without the authorization of U.S.
authorities. Iraqi second deputy prime minister for
energy affairs Hussain Al-Shahristani, who is
independent of any party, denounced the ExxonMobil
involvement with the KRG as illegal. The latest
SIGIR report notes that Hess Corporation, an
American energy company, was banned by the Baghdad
authorities from a fourth round of licensing for 12
new exploration blocks elsewhere in Iraq after it
signed a contract with the KRG.
Copyright © 2011, respective
author or news agency,
weeklystandard.com
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