One of the first things you see as you drive through northern Iraq is the vibrant black market in gasoline. There’s pink fuel (left) and clear fuel; the pink is supposed to be better. It’s my understanding that most of it is smuggled from Iran. There are “legit” gas stations as well, but few actually have gas, and the ones that do attract lines stretching for as much as a mile. According to our driver, people will sleep in their cars for two nights to secure the far lower prices from legit stations. (Women can drive in northern Iraq—including women in headscarves—but they wait in separate gas lines.)
The black market operates in plain view, at roadsides everywhere. Drivers pull over and enter into gruff negotiations with the enterprising young men who sell the fuel. Once the price is settled, the funnel comes out—usually a plastic soda bottle with the bottom cut off and a makeshift hose fastened to the nozzle. Sometimes you need to roll your rear tire onto a couple of rocks to elevate the car so the gas pours downward properly. The cost? I’m bad with numbers but for four days’ drive-time we had to pay our fixer an extra $170 or so.
Obviously, it’s insane for Iraq, an oil-rich country, to have an acute fuel shortage (apparently the north has it worst). One middle-aged Kurdish man argued that the U.S. and Britain are “stealing” the oil—Kurds are famously pro-American but they don’t hesitate to say such things. There’s little reason to trust the oil giants, but the truth is certainly more complicated, as these reports suggest. My sense is that Iraq is simply not producing enough oil to steal. In fact, if this whole war was about oil greed, it’s yet another thing the U.S. has botched, at least in the short term.
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