29 August 2008 China this week became the first country since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein to clinch an oil deal with Iraq, by reviving the first of a series of contracts signed by the previous Iraqi regime under new terms dictated by new realities. The service contract for development of the Al-Ahdab field, which includes a mix of old production sharing elements and new service contract terms, sets a…
Category: Perspectives
Historical perspectives by years
Iraq: Paralysis At The Top
8 August 2008 More than nine months after they were first launched, Iraq’s technical support contracts (TSC) — the first commercial agreements with Big Oil since nationalization in the 1970s — are in limbo. The official view from Baghdad is that the short-term deals are losing their relevance due to protracted negotiations and the possibility that they will overlap with the award of long-term service contracts under the recently launched…
Iraq: The Sunni Agenda
25 July 2008 Tarek al-Hashemi, the head of the Iraqi Islamic Party, holds the highest Sunni political position in the current political setup as vice president and plays a major role in determining which way Sunni politics go. His most recent achievement is negotiating the return of Sunni ministers to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government this week, after a boycott that lasted for almost a year over differences on security…
Iraq: The Shiite View
25 July 2008 Iraqi Shiite Vice President Adel Abdul Mehdi does not disguise his and his party’s ambitions in establishing a semiautonomous region in southern Iraq, home to the country’s most abundant and biggest oil fields, in parallel to the Kurdistan region in northern Iraq, despite Sunni objections and warnings that the move would practically divide Iraq into three mini-states, with the southern region backed by influential Shiite neighbor Iran….