AP)
Iraq will bolster its military presence in the oil-rich north of the country, where saboteurs and insurgents repeatedly have targeted workers, pipelines and facilities, the Iraqi oil minister said Monday.
"We already have a military presence there and we're going to reinforce it," Hussain al-Shahristani told reporters at a meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
"We have engaged Iraqi defense forces to protect these pipelines, and we hope to be able to use those pipelines which have been down for quite a few months now," he said.
Iraq's northern oil fields produced an estimated 8.5 million barrels of crude in July, former Iraqi oil minister Ibrahim Mohammad Bahr Al Olom said last week. But repeated attacks on oil workers and infrastructure have made it difficult for the country to lift the country's production back to prewar levels of about 2.5 million to 3 million barrels a day.
On Monday, gunmen in two cars ambushed a bus carrying oil employees in northern Iraq, killing four and injuring another, police said.
The bus had been taking the employees from Beiji, the country's biggest refinery which is 155 miles north of Baghdad, to Tuz Khormato district, some 75 miles southeast of Beiji, on Sunday night, police Capt. Khalid Sabah said.
Iraq now is pumping between 2.3 million and 2.4 million barrels a day "and we're going to increase it," al-Shahristani said.
He told reporters that Iraq hopes to increase production to between 4 million and 4.5 million barrels a day, though he conceded it would take $20 billion in infrastructure investment to achieve that.
"Everyone agrees that the oil sector needs a huge investment and should be the locomotive of the economy," al-Shahristani said, but added that "soft" loans could be a solution so Iraq's budget isn't overly tapped.
The nation is excluded from OPEC's production quota of 28 million barrels a day.
Al-Shahristani said Iraqi authorities also have launched a campaign against smugglers who steal from gas stations and peddle the fuel on the black market.