US-backed Kurdish forces on Thursday took control of the northern oilfields around Kirkuk, while the southern fields were secured by the coalition in the first days of the war.

Nearly all of Iraq's 112 billion barrels of proven reserves, the largest in the world after Saudi Arabia, are now under total coalition control. Exports from the south could restart within three months.

The US Central Command in Qatar said Thursday that coalition engineers had inspected around 800 of the 1,000 oil wells in the southern fields, and have begun examining pumping stations, pipeline facilities, and gas-oil separation plants. Besides occasional leakage, they reported no damage.

Oilfields around Kirkuk continued sending crude through a pipeline to the Turkish terminal of Ceyhan at least until late Thursday, indicating that there was little damage done to them.

Storage tanks at Ceyhan now hold 8.3 million barrels of usable Iraqi crude but they cannot be exported as communications with Iraq's state-oil marketer Somo was lost and no other party is legally empowered to sell it.

A US-appointed official, retired General Jay Garner, is preparing to take temporary control of the country. It is yet not known whether it will be his administration that will sign potential oil contracts, as trans-Atlantic wrangling continues on the post-war role of the United Nations.

The US troops, however, have shut down the pipeline that fed Syrian refineries with crude oil from southern Iraqi fields around Basra, ending a trade that started in November 2000, in violation of the UN sanctions imposed on Iraq since 1990.

Iraq's cheap oil supply through this pipeline, which ran until March at around 200,000 barrels per day (bpd), had allowed Syria to double its own exports to 400,000 bpd.

Syria's state oil marketer Sytrol on Tuesday told its clients that it will slash its export volumes by nearly half for the rest of the year.

Jordan denied Wednesday Israeli press reports that a meeting was to be held between Israeli and Jordanian officials to reopen a pipeline transporting crude from Iraq to Haifa, closed after the creation of the Jewish state in

"The pipeline no longer exists in the Jordanian territories," Jordan's Energy Minister Mohammed Batayneh told the Jordan Times in Amman.

The fate of Saddam Hussein, who had played a major role in nationalising Iraq's oil wealth as vice-president in 1972 before becoming president in 1979, remains unknown.

Iraqi oil experts in exile and US officials agreed during a meeting in London last weekend on the need for international oil companies (IOC) to rehabilitate and develop the oil sector, devastated by three wars in two decades and by 12 years of sanctions, as Iraq lacks the technical and financial means.

Iraqi delegates at the meeting said foreign participation would probably be sought under production-sharing agreements that allow IOCs to be reimbursed with part of the oilfields' output for the duration of the contract.

This would not be new in Iraq, as Saddam's government provisionally awarded such deals to foreign firms in the 1990s, with the obvious aim of enlisting their government's help in lifting the sanctions.

But these contracts could not be implemented because of UN sanctions, and US companies, which were kept at bay, are expected now to seek a role commensurate with their country's contribution to the war.

SPACE.WIRE