Oil officials say smugglers are getting rich selling millions of dollars worth of gasoline every month to neighbouring countries.
By Beth Potter - BAGHDAD
In the shadowy world beyond Iraq's insurgency, another conflict is pitting oil ministry officials against international smugglers draining the nation's main source of wealth.
Iraqi motorists say they are seeing the benefits of the ministry assault on the criminal mafia chasing high stakes in smuggling fuel across frontiers to Jordan and Turkey.
Petrol shortages have plagued the capital on and off since US-led forces invaded Iraq two years ago. Drivers often had to wait hours to fill up, some sleeping overnight in their cars waiting for stations to open.
One Iraqi driver, Munaf Monem, 34, recalls how he waited more than five hours one day to fill up his white Chevy at Mansour gas station in the capital.
These days, helped by the crackdown, there is more petrol at the pumps and it takes just 15 minutes, said Monem.
Iraqi oil officials say that smugglers are getting rich selling millions of dollars worth of gasoline every month to neighbouring countries.
Given the state of some of the ageing equipment at Iraq's refineries and sabotage attacks by insurgents, the disappearance of any supplies of petrol is serious.
Smuggling has long been part of Iraq's economic make-up. In the final years of the former regime, it was the then president Saddam Hussein's officials who ran a network using ships and tanker-trucks to circumvent UN sanctions.
Now, it is the criminals helped often by corrupt officials.
Smugglers make an average 18 million dinars (12,000 dollars, 9,200 euros) profit from every tanker truckload of petrol they divert to sell abroad, said Samir Michael Asaad, oil ministry manager of technical support.
"If you want to stop smuggling, you must increase prices" at home, said Asaad.
The smugglers' profit comes from the difference between Iraq's heavily subsidised pump prices of 50 dinars (about three cents) a litre and pump prices of 35 cents (27 euro cents) per litter in some neighbouring countries, he said.
The men pay off border officials and sell the contents of the tankers direct to gas stations in both Jordan and Turkey.
Asaad has set up computer-generated charts to show discrepancies between the amount of petrol sent to stations and what actually arrives.
"Whenever there is a difference between gas quantities, they investigate," Asaad said, adding that investigators were also sacking or transferring oil officials they find to be involved.
Officials believe they are close to arresting "big fish" mafia figures who are running operations from outside the ministry, said a worker in the inspector general's office, declining to be named for fear he will be killed.
At least two people connected with fuel distribution have been murdered in recent months. The son of Luey Jabbar, manager of imports, was killed a week ago, an oil ministry manager said, declining to be named.
Hussein Fattah, the former imports manager, was killed in January, and his family has gone into hiding.
With an estimated 750,000 new cars on Iraq's roads since the fall of Saddam's regime, internal demand has surged to more than six million litres per day, Asaad said.
Iraq's three main refineries cannot keep up.
They run at 70 percent of capacity or less because of ageing machinery and attacks by insurgents, according to Dathar al-Kashab, general manager of Dora refinery, south of Baghdad.
( Talk about Irony )
So Iraq pays 200 million dollars per month to import refined gasoline, mostly from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, according to Thamer Ghadhban, the interim oil minister.
The attempt to crush smuggling appears to be the first of its kind in post-war Iraq where charges of widespread corruption and government mismanagement abound.
Former US administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer named independent inspector generals to every government ministry to investigate charges of corruption before sovereignty was handed back to Iraqis in June.
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