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Iraq's lack of fuel stokes fires of anger, resentment

"We were expecting the American forces to come here and provide us with things, to make everything better. We are a rich country. We have oil. But nothing is happening."

Hadi Ali, irate Iraqi car owner

Gasoline fuels fires. The lack of it can do the same.

Ask Hadi Ali, a 58-year-old civil engineer and irate car owner. He had been waiting an hour on a recent morning to fill his gas tank by the time his car finally crept up to the pumps. The line behind him was 110 cars long, stretching for almost a kilometer down one of central Baghdad's wide boulevards.

"We were expecting the American forces to come here and provide us with things, to make everything better," he said as he stared out the windshield of his maroon Peugeot sedan. "We are a rich country. We have oil. But nothing is happening."

For the past two weeks, motorists in this traffic-choked city have waited up to half a day just to fill their tanks, after several months of more modest lines. The problem, officials say, is mainly from guerrilla attacks on northern oil pipelines.

Some taxi drivers have spent alternate days getting gas rather than working. What is more, the high-grade gas prized by owners of imports like BMW's and Mercedes-Benzes suddenly disappeared from stations more than a week ago.

Over the summer, American soldiers were posted at gas stations to discourage a black market in gasoline. But now jobless men stand by the lines of cars and offer to sell gas from plastic jerrycans at huge markups -- sometimes five times the stations' rate. As Ali inched up to a big government-run gas station called Al Hurea, which means "freedom," a boy raced up to a nearby Range Rover with a jerrycan and a funnel cut from a plastic water bottle.

The gas lines are a visible sign of an infrastructure that has yet to be restored. As with so many things here, frustration over waits often turns to venomous feelings aimed at Iraq's foreign administration. In early August, riots broke out in the southern city of Basra over shortages of gasoline and electricity.

Asim Jihad, a spokesman for the Oil Ministry, said repeated bombings of the northern pipelines were the main cause of the current shortages. On Nov. 17, insurgents blew up a section of the pipeline between a refinery in the town of Baiji and the main refinery in Baghdad, called Dora.

Jihad added that the surge in car imports since tariffs were lifted after the American-led invasion -- 250,000 have flooded the country -- has also raised demand for gas.

The gas pumps need electricity, and large sections of Baghdad lost electricity for almost three days two weeks ago, contributing to the problem. Multihour blackouts have remained frequent ever since.

The power failures have also led many people to use gasoline-powered generators, so they siphon gas from their cars, worsening the shortage.

Zubeid al-Zubeidy, the manager of Al Hurea, said the government usually sent four full tankers a day to his station, but that number fell to two or three several days in the past week.

"I'm nervous because of the people," he said, a handgun on his desk. "If I get 100 percent deliveries, then it's easy to provide gas. If not, then the people will come and take their anger out on me."

Dan Senor, a spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American-led administration, said the run on gas was seasonal and perhaps worsened by consumers who buy fuel when they don't need it. "We've heard from some Iraqis that when they suspect there is going to be a shortage, there is a sort of hoarding that goes on," he said.

Some Iraqis are profiting from the tough times. One driver said he had gone to a gas station that opened only at night and sold gas at twice the government price. On the road in front of Zubeidy's station, Ali al-Jubory, 33, a soldier left jobless when American administrators disbanded the Iraqi army in May, stood around with four male relatives and offered motorists gas from a jerrycan.

They were asking 100 dinars, or about US$0.05 cents, per liter. They had been doing this for three days, selling 200 liters a day.

"We can't save money from this, but we can live from day to day," Jubory said.
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