All is not well in northern Iraq's oilfields
In northern Iraq, ethnic Kurdish security forces called peshmerga patrol the poorly defined border of the country's Kurdish region, with clear orders to keep Iraqi army troops out.
"Everyone here is on alert," Al Jazeera's Omar al-Saleh reported from near the internal border on January 17. With both sides fully armed, he said, "any mistake could lead to a violent conflict".
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki claims the right to freely move soldiers anywhere in the country, but the country's semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) says this is unconstitutional.
As in so many other conflicts around the world, the presence of oil is raising the stakes and the tensions. Iraq's ethnic Kurdish region is so oil-rich that in some places, the stuff literally oozes out of the ground.
The KRG is using this oil to flex its political muscle and its growing independence from Baghdad: Earlier this month, a truck laden with crude oil from Iraq's Kurdish region delivered its wares to the Turkish port of Mersin, on the Mediterranean Sea - marking the first time that the KRG has exported oil directly to world markets.
In northern Iraq, ethnic Kurdish security forces called peshmerga patrol the poorly defined border of the country's Kurdish region, with clear orders to keep Iraqi army troops out.
"Everyone here is on alert," Al Jazeera's Omar al-Saleh reported from near the internal border on January 17. With both sides fully armed, he said, "any mistake could lead to a violent conflict".
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki claims the right to freely move soldiers anywhere in the country, but the country's semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) says this is unconstitutional.
As in so many other conflicts around the world, the presence of oil is raising the stakes and the tensions. Iraq's ethnic Kurdish region is so oil-rich that in some places, the stuff literally oozes out of the ground.
The KRG is using this oil to flex its political muscle and its growing independence from Baghdad: Earlier this month, a truck laden with crude oil from Iraq's Kurdish region delivered its wares to the Turkish port of Mersin, on the Mediterranean Sea - marking the first time that the KRG has exported oil directly to world markets.
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