By Steve Negus
Financial Times, 21 August 2006
In the chaos of a north Baghdad petrol station, where motorists who have waited for hours in 50°C heat jostle with black-clad women desperately trying to fill jerrycans for home generators, a nervous-looking man approaches a group of US troops just arrived at the scene.
Only 10 minutes ago, he says, the station had been under the control of Mahdi Army militiamen who have terrorised the local oil min-istry protection force and kidnapped two employees. The militiamen had fled as the Americans approached, he said, but would soon be back.
The US military has deployed thousands of troops into Baghdad in the last month to try to contain sectarian violence, which by most estimates claims dozens of lives a day. The killing is largely blamed on feuding militia and insurgent networks, some of whom are – according to residents of the capital – fighting each other for control of mixed-sectarian neighbourhoods.
Throughout Iraq, petrol stations are one of the main prizes in the militia turf wars. They are both money-makers and symbols of territorial control.
According to US soldiers, petrol station takeovers are a tactic used by armed groups countrywide, from remote highways in the Sunni heartland – where the stations are popular gathering points for unemployed young men and thus double as recruiting stations for insurgent commanders – to the farmlands south of Baghdad where Shia militias allegedly make Sunni pay tripled prices.
The roots of the problem lie in Iraq’s heavily subsidised fuel, which sees demand far outstripping the supply fed to the station by the ministry of oil, and feeds a healthy black market. Queues outside gas stations can sometimes run for a kilometre or more and can entail up to a 24-hour wait in line to buy fuel.
Officially, motorists are only allowed to fill up their tanks but anyone with connections at the station can fill up a jerrycan or two that can then be sold at up to many times the official price (about 25 cents a litre) by the side of the road.
Here the militias come in, regulating who gets to buy the extra black market fuel and who doesn’t, allowing their supporters to push in front of the queue, and taking a share of their profits.
The gunmen sometimes pose as protectors, keeping away other marauders and preventing the fights that inevitably break out in the queue, thus building up their reputation as de facto local government.
Control of the petrol black market, combined with protection money reaped from government oil tanker trucks and smuggling abroad, is one of the important sources of financing for the country’s armed groups. Last year an oil ministry auditor estimated the total value of the smuggling trade at $4bn; at least half of which goes to fund the insurgency.
The guards employed by the oil ministry are generally poorly motivated and reluctant to take on gunmen who outnumber and outgun them. At this station, the guards do not even have ammunition for their Kalashnikovs, having fired their bullets into the air while trying to control traffic.
The US commander Cpt Will Arnold gives the guards a brief pep talk and distributes ammunition and his phone number, telling them to call next time the militia shows up. The presence of the Americans and the Iraqi army also gets the line moving, eliciting thanks from several sweaty motorists.
The Americans eventually drive off. Next day a report comes in that the guards at one neighbourhood station fought off a robbery attempt by an armed gang. It could not at once be established whether it was the same station visited the day before.
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Citation: Steve Negus. "Iraq’s petrol stations fuel turf wars," Financial Times, 21 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/a9c39e26-3138-11db-b953-0000779e2340.html
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