KIRKUK, Iraq (AFP) - Orange gas flares from Iraq's northern oil fields illuminate the night horizon outside Kirkuk, lighting the extraterrestrial panorama like several pregnant dawns. But most of the poor Sunni Arab villages along the 100 kilometres of underground pipelines running southwest to the Baiji oil refinery are shrouded in pre-industrial darkness.The oil-rich region could export more than a million barrels per day, but the Baiji refinery receives just enough oil to keep it operating, and the onward export pipeline to the Turkish port of Ceyhan is dry.
Those who enjoyed few, if any, benefits from the country's vast oil reserves in the days of Saddam Hussein are enjoying even fewer now.
"They are capable of exporting 1.2 million barrels per day, but right now are exporting zero," says US military Lieutenant Colonel Jack Pritchard of the 3rd Battalion, 7th Field Artillery. His unit is charged with guarding underground pipelines running through those dusty Arab villages against tribal turf fights and smuggling networks built to evade international sanctions in the 1990s.
The only crude line that is operational is a 26-inch (66-centimetre) pipeline with a capacity of 220,000 barrels a day, enough to keep the Baiji refinery running. Other lines bring refined products back to Kirkuk.
But the 40-inch (102-centimetre) export pipeline, the one that could bring untold wealth to the war-torn country - "that's our biggest musykila," Pritchard says, using the Arabic word for problem. "This pipeline is the Achilles heel of the whole system. You put a quarter-size (coin-size) hole in it and you have a pretty big problem on your hands."
Which is what happened last October when insurgents bombed the line, sending a sea of oil gushing out over the brown grassy plains. It took two months just to clean the site enough to begin to repair the hole. "Meanwhile you had a half-million barrels of oil sitting in the line between Kirkuk and Baiji, and depending on the security situation it was there for the taking," Pritchard says.
The pipelines are guarded by a special brigade of around 5,000 US-led Iraqi army soldiers, but of the seven battalions under Pritchard's command only four are effective - and at least one was believed to be collaborating in attacks. "We are sending them to be retrained. It was either that or send them to prison," says Pritchard.
On a searing July afternoon the misfit soldiers sit in a line outside the battalion office, waiting to head back to training.
The problem, they say, is that they were posted too close to home, where family and tribal ties made it impossible to go after insurgents and smugglers. "It was hard because I was guarding the area where I live," one soldier says.
Adds another: "Everyone knows us. If we strike someone they will come after us, and they know where our houses and our families are." Both refused to give their names.
With Iraq's warring factions deadlocked over a draft law aimed at fairly distributing the country's oil wealth, no one appears terribly interested in bringing Kirkuk's oil to market, at least not immediately. "There doesn't seem to be a lot of motivation to export, except from the United States," Pritchard says.
Meanwhile, insurgents continue to hit the pipelines, denying the government revenues, driving up petrol prices and forcing everyone from professional smugglers to local farmers to tap into the black market. "It's not unusual in the winter to see black smoke coming out of chimneys, so that says to me that people are burning crude oil in their homes to stay warm," Pritchard says.