Petrol shortage in north

For the past week, drivers in Iraq's northeastern Sulaymaniyah governorate have been waiting for up to five hours to fill their cars and trucks with fuel as deteriorating security in surrounding areas has slowed the influx of petrol and diesel supplies, according to local officials. "We require an average of 1,100 to 1,200 cubic metres of petrol and 1,000 cu.m. of diesel a day, the equivalent of around 110 oil tankers," Serdar Abdolkerim, director of the body responsible for distributing oil in Sulaymaniyah governorate, the Public Foundation for Oil Projects, told IRIN in Sulaymaniyah. "For the past two weeks we have received only a tenth of that." Apart from small quantities produced at a local refinery at Bedji, Sulaymaniyah is almost entirely dependent for its supplies on oil - mostly Iraqi crude refined in Turkey - trucked in from the northwestern Iraqi city of Mosul by Turkish drivers. "We no longer drive out of Kurdish-controlled areas to Mosul," said Kuran Icen, an Ankara-based truck driver waiting to fill up with diesel at Sulaymaniyah's Rizgari petrol station. "It's just too dangerous." Like his four colleagues, he reached Sulaymaniyah via roads deep in the Kurdish-controlled mountains - a two-day trip. Turkish concerns about safety began late in July, when an Iraqi insurgent group released video footage showing the murder of truck driver Murat Yuce. By 3 August, the International Transportation Association (ITA), representing Turkish truckers, had announced that Turkish drivers would no longer help transport goods to US soldiers in Iraq. However, some truck drivers have since resumed their work. Kuran Icen and his colleagues did not mention any specific reason for their refusal to travel via Mosul, and they denied widespread rumours of a strike among Turkish truckers. But the date at which oil supplies to Sulaymaniyah began to slow tallies with an Al-Jazeera news report on 2 September saying the Arabic satellite TV channel had received evidence of the murder of three more Turkish drivers. In the latest incident, another tape recording of the murder of a truck driver was posted on an Islamic website dated 17 August, but released only this week. The video showing their executions was released by the Tawhid wal Jihad group, allegedly linked to Abu Mussab al-Zarkawi and to Al-Qaeda. Al-Zarkawi is suspected of being the mastermind of several terrorist attacks, according to Washington. Like most other Kurds, Abdolkerim sees few reasons to hope that the security situation in and around Mosul will improve. But he predicts that the reduction in oil supplies is likely only to be temporary. "The roads through Kurdish territory are narrow and poorly kept, but they are perfectly safe," he said. "The Turkish drivers are slowly becoming aware of that." In the past two days, he added, oil supplies had gone up to just over 50 percent of normal requirements. "Mosul has promised us more," he said. But he also admitted that the oil shortage had served as a warning to the administrators of Sulaymaniyah governorate. "Lack of security has affected oil transport throughout Iraq, but only we have been hit this hard," he said. "What we did wrong was to fail to ensure that we had enough oil reserves." His office is now working fast on a proposal to install far larger reserve tanks. Work has also started on plans to build a small oil refinery next to Sulaymaniyah's largest oil-fuelled generator. In the future, it is hoped that the 29 MW generator would be fuelled entirely by oil taken from fields within the Kurdish area.