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Iraqis queue for hours to fill up petrol in Mosul amid shortages
The Arab News reported, citing the AFP, motorists in Iraq’s main northern city of Mosul queued for hours on Friday to fill up their cars with petrol, with authorities blaming shortages on smuggling to the nearby Kurdistan region.
AFP journalists reported that for the past week, long lines have formed at petrol stations in Mosul and the rest of Nineveh province.
Soldiers were deployed in some stations to contain any violence, as tempers flared among motorists over the petrol shortage.
Taxi driver Abdel Khaliq Al-Mousalli complained.“Our lives are made of waiting in line. It has become a routine."
Shortages are frequent in Nineveh, where petrol is subsidized by the federal government and sells at around 500 Iraqi dinars per liter (0.33 US cents).
But in the neighboring Kurdish autonomous region, petrol costs twice as much.
Nineveh Gov. Nejm Al-Jibbouri said on Thursday that “information” suggested that the petrol shortage is due to “smuggling” toward Kurdistan.
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He told a local television network that he had instructed security forces to “tighten checks at checkpoints to prevent petrol from leaving the province.”
Ihsan Mussa Ghanem, deputy head of the Iraqi agency in charge of distributing petroleum products, said, Nineveh received more than 2 million liters of petrol a day, “the highest amount after Baghdad.” He added: “The price of oil in Kurdistan is 40 percent higher than in other provinces and that has put pressure on Nineveh, with many Kurdistan residents coming here to fill up."
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Iraq is the second-largest producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. The nearly 3.5 million barrels per day exported by the country account for more than 90 percent of its income.
Source: arabnews
