It may sound incredible, but Iraq boycotts a member state of the coalition. According to the Korean ministry of Energy, quoted by AFP, Iraq has cut off oil supplies to Seoul (accounting to some 3% of the Korean imports).
This decision was made by the Iraqi ministry of Oil, run by an Arab shia, after a deal contracted by South Korea’s top refiner SK Energy and the regional governement of Kurdistan, the de facto autonomous northern region of Iraq.
An amazing decision, considering that Seoul has 600 troops stationed in the Kurdish region and is a major part of the US led coalition.
The dispute reveals the tensions between the Iraqi central governement and the Kurdish local authorities, especially for the control of oil resources.
I was last month in Kirkuk, along with my friend and colleague Angélique Férat.
Being there a first time traveller, I was impressed to see the Kurdish faith in this land. It looks very much like a kind of « Kurdish zionism » : Kurds claim to be a people without a land, and say Kirkuk was a land without a people… but with a lot of oil.
Actually, this claim could ignite ethnic tensions beetween Kurds on the first hand, and the other unhabitants of the city, Arabs and Turkomans, on the other.
A very good analysis of this conflict risk was published by the International crisis group, and is available for download here.
And I made this story for Arte Info :
And a big thanks to Benoît Schaeffer for the head pix of this page.
On these pages, you can find a selection of my work, and some of my comments on the news. I opened a new section where I review some of my recent readings.
In order to make it as international as possible, I write most of this blog in English. Sometime with a bit of my lovely French accent...
