伊拉克解体危机有望催生库尔德地区石油开采热潮

    伊拉克的暴力冲突持续升级。虽然残暴如基地组织的逊尼派伊斯兰主义者正在跟什叶派领导的政府展开殊死搏斗，但对于500万库尔德人来说，这场如火如荼的灾难似乎会带来巨大的好处，甚至有可能在世界上催生一个最新的石油国家。

    大约一年多以前，《财富》(Fortune)记者前往伊拉克北部的库尔德自治区，并在随后刊发的一篇报道中声称，鉴于不同派别发动战争以争夺该国巨额石油财富的控制权，埃克森美孚公司(ExxonMobil)和库尔德地区政府(KRG)达成的交易可能会引发伊拉克内战。库尔德官员当时表示，听闻世界上最大的石油公司打算在这里钻探石油，他们欣喜若狂。国际能源机构(International Energy Agency)声称，库尔德自治区拥有40亿桶已探明石油储量，但KRG预测称，真实的储量接近45亿桶。不过，库尔德官员去年警告说，华盛顿的伊拉克政策混乱不堪，误入歧途，正在促发一场灾难。“美国的政策是，‘完事了，我们撤了。已经打勾了。该继续前进了。’”当时在库尔德地区首府埃尔比勒接受采访时，库尔德高级官员库巴德•塔拉巴尼这样说道。塔拉巴尼曾经担任KRG驻华盛顿代表，上个月刚刚成为KRG副总理。在他和其他官员看来，尽管什叶派主导的巴格达政府、作为少数族裔的伊拉克逊尼派，以及数十年来一直怀抱独立梦想的库尔德社区已经严重分裂，但美国官员还是决定把伊拉克维系成为一个统一的完整国家。“美国仍然希望伊拉克人首先是伊拉克人，”塔拉巴尼说。“好像只要足够频繁地表达这种愿望，它就会成真似的。但这种情形根本就不会出现。”

    现在看来，塔拉巴尼的这番话极富预见性。随着过去六天不断升级的暴力冲突，伊拉克似乎正朝着三向分裂的道路疾驰而去：逊尼派激进圣战组织控制的伊拉克西部地区；北部的库尔德地区；什叶派控制的伊拉克南部和中部地区。作为石油输出国家组织(OPEC)第二大石油生产国、世界上最大的石油国家之一，面临解体可能性的伊拉克即将陷入巨大的动荡之中。但对库尔德人来说，这不啻为一个巨大的胜利。

    简单回顾一下伊拉克局势：这场危机已经持续了一整年，但直到上周三才进入国际社会的视野。当天，一个叫做“伊拉克与黎凡特伊斯兰国( ISIS)”的武装组织突然攻入摩苏尔，几乎不费吹灰之力就拿下了这座伊拉克第二大城市；政府军逃之夭夭，放弃了美国用来武装伊拉克军队的武器装备，其中包括装甲车、攻击型直升机和机关枪。具有讽刺意味的是，这些价值数千万美元的武器原本是用来对付伊斯兰叛乱分子的。现如今，ISIS士兵驾驶着美国直升机飞向天空，载满这些叛乱分子的美国装甲车轰隆隆地向南部地区挺进，很快就占领了萨达姆家乡提克里特，剑锋直指巴格达郊区。上周日，这群武装分子还攻克了摩苏尔以西、拥有大约20万人口的小城泰勒阿费尔。

    上周日，ISIS在Twitter上发布了一组令人毛骨悚然的照片和消息（现已删除），伊拉克的可怕现实终于浮现在世人面前。这个组织声称，他们的战士已经在提克里特处决了大约1,700伊拉克士兵。由于ISIS控制区几乎没有独立记者的踪迹，这些图像目前还难以核实。然而，受到照片中可怕场面的刺激，什叶派呼吁报仇雪恨。最近几天，数千名什叶派穆斯林争相加入了各地的民兵组织。

    群山环绕的库尔德自治区位于伊拉克北部，处于叙利亚、土耳其和伊朗之间，巴格达政府允许该地区享有一部分政治自主权，但禁止它自行出口石油。在库尔德人看来，尽管暴乱局势的演变速度令人震惊，但它实际上是一个天赐良机，有望解决他们与巴格达持续多年的谈判僵局。

    上周四，伊拉克军队放弃石油储量充沛的基尔库克市之后，被称为“自由斗士(peshmerga)”的库尔德士兵迅速行动，最终控制了这片石油储量接近90亿桶的区域。现在，埃克森美孚公司的新油田已经牢牢掌控在库尔德人手中，而不是处在一片库尔德人和巴格达政府都声称拥有所有权的争议领土之上。上世纪80年代和90年代，萨达姆通过一轮轮残酷的种族清洗运动赶走了库尔德人。数十年来，基尔库克的主权一直极具争议，但库尔德人重新夺回这座城市的决心从来没有动摇过。

    自从美军2012年撤离伊拉克以来，伊拉克总理努里•马利基已经明确表示，政府将把所有在库尔德人声称拥有主权的区域运营的石油公司列入黑名单，禁止它们开发伊拉克南部的超巨型油田。埃克森美孚公司有效地忽略了这一威胁——它揣测（非常准确），作为全球最大的石油公司，自己不会被拒之门外。与此同时，库尔德人在过去几个月已经静悄悄地开启了通往土耳其的石油出口管道，正在一步一个脚印地搭建起成立一个新国家的基石。

    现在，这个新的国家看起来已经成为现实，只是差个名分而已。KRG不太可能很快就宣布真正的独立，这是一种很高明的策略。鉴于伊拉克已经陷于动荡，它几乎不需要这样做。“库尔德人非常清楚，过去几天的事件使得他们能够在将来某个时刻宣布独立，”欧亚集团(Eurasia Group)中东事务主管艾哈姆•卡迈勒周一对《财富》记者这样说道。“我们正在迈向建国的方向，这一点毫无疑问，但我们不会在2014年宣布独立。”

    去年赶赴基尔库克采访时，我的向导，库尔德人霍桑•伊斯梅尔告诉我，如果巴格达胆敢阻止他们开采石油，库尔德人随时准备开战。伊斯梅尔是阿联酋新月石油公司( Crescent Petroleum)的社区开发总监。他说：“除了现状之外，没有什么能够把我们和伊拉克绑在一起。”如今，现状已经分崩离析。库尔德人和他们的油田已经跟周遭的动荡没有任何瓜葛了。（财富中文网）

    译者：叶寒

    While violence explodes in Iraq between the brutal al-Qaeda-type Sunni Islamists and the Shiite-led government, there are five million Iraqis for which the unfolding disaster looks set to bring big benefits, as well perhaps as the world’s newest oil state—the Kurds.

    Little more than a year ago, Fortune traveled to Iraq’s autonomous northern region as Kurdistan to describehow the deal between ExxonMobil XOM 0.26% and the Kurdish Regional Government, or KRG, could spark civil war in Iraq, as different factions waged battle for control over the country’s immense oil riches. At the time, Kurdish officials said they were thrilled that the world’s biggest oil company was about to start drilling in their autonomous region, which the International Energy Agency says has 4 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, but which the KRG estimates could in reality be closer to 45 billion barrels. Still, Kurdish officials warned last year that Washington’s muddled, misguided Iraq policy was a disaster in the making. “The U.S. policy is, ‘We got out, finished. Box checked. Move on,’ ” Qubad Talabani, a senior Kurdistan official who became the KRG’s Deputy Prime Minister last month, told me at the time in Kurdistan’s capital Irbil. One major problem, according to Talabani (who was previously KRG representative in Washington) and other officials, was that U.S. officials were determined to keep Iraq as a unified intact country, despite the bitter schisms between the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, Iraq’s Sunni minority, and the Kurdish community, which has dreamed of having their own state for decades. “The U.S. still wants Iraqis to be Iraqis first,” Talabani said. “It’s like, if they say it enough it will be so. But it won’t.”

    Now Talabani’s words sound eerily prophetic. With the past six days’ violence, Iraq appears to be hurtling towards a three-way breakup: A Sunni-dominated western Iraq dominated by hardline militant jihadist groups; a northern Kurdish territory, and a southern and central Shiite Iraq. With the potential for disintegration comes major upheaval in Opec’s second biggest oil producer and one of the world’s biggest oil nations—and a huge victory for the Kurds.

    Just to recap: Iraq’s crisis, which has bubbled all year, exploded into view last Wednesday when militants from Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, stormed into Iraq’s second city Mosul and seized it with barely a fight; government soldiers fled, abandoning an arsenal of U.S. weaponry worth tens of millions of dollars, including armored vehicles, attack helicopters and machine guns with which the U.S. had equipped Iraq’s military, ironically to fight Islamic insurgents. Instead, ISIS fighters took to the sky in a U.S. helicopter and rumbled south laden with American armor, quickly taking Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit and edging towards the outskirts of Baghdad. On Sunday it also seized Tal Afar, a town of about 200,000 people west of Mosul.

    The horrific reality on the ground emerged on Sunday when ISIS posted macabre photographs and messages on Twitter (since removed) claiming that their fighters had executed about 1,700 Iraqi forces in Tikrit. Since there are almost no independent journalists working in the ISIS-held territory, the images are difficult to verify. But the gruesome scenes fueled calls for revenge among Shiites, thousands of whom have rushed to join militias in recent days.

    Seen from the prism of Kurdistan—Iraq’s mountainous northern region hemmed between Syria, Turkey and Iran, which enjoys some political autonomy from Baghdad, but which is forbidden to export its own oil—the stunningly quick implosion has been a potential godsend, in effect, sorting out years of deadlocked arguments with Baghdad.

    As Iraqi forces abandoned the hugely oil-rich town of Kirkuk last Thursday, Kurdish soldiers, called peshmerga, moved in swiftly, seizing control of an area which on its own has nearly 9 billion barrels of oil reserves. That places Exxon’s new bloc solidly in Kurdish hands rather than in some fuzzy contested territory that both Kurds and Baghdad claim. Kirkuk has been intensely disputed since Saddam drove out the Kurds during the 1980s and 1990s in a brutal ethnic-cleansing campaign, and the Kurds have been determined to recapture it for decades.

    Since the U.S. occupation ended in 2012, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has made it that the government would blacklist any oil company operating in territory the Kurds claimed was theirs, and shut it out of southern Iraq’s supergiant fields; Exxon effectively ignored the threat, calculating (correctly) that it was too big to shut out. And meanwhile, the Kurds have over the past months quietly opened its own export pipeline to Turkey, steadily putting in place the building blocks of a new country.

    Now that new state looks like a reality in all but name. Cunningly, the KRG is unlikely to declare real independence soon. With Iraq in havoc, it hardly needs to. “It’s become very clear to the Kurds that events in the past few days will enable them to declare independence at some point,” Ayham Kamel, Middle East director of the Eurasia Group, told Fortune on Monday. “We are definitely moving in the direction of statehood, but it will not be declared in 2014.”

    When I traveled to Kirkuk last year, my Kurdish guide, Hoshang Ishmail, the community development manager for the United Arab Emirates-based Crescent Petroleum, told me that Kurds would readily fight if Baghdad every blocked them from drilling for oil. “Nothing binds us to Iraq except the status quo,” he said. Now that status quo has been ripped apart. And little binds the Kurds and their oil fields to the chaos raging around them.