SULAIMANI (ESTA) — Motorists in 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 reported.
For the past week, long lines have formed at petrol stations in Mosul and the rest of Nineveh province, according to AFP.
AFP said soldiers were deployed in some stations to contain any violence, as tempers flared among motorists over the petrol shortage.
“Our lives are made of waiting in line. It has become a routine,” AFP quoted taxi driver Abdel Khaliq al-Mousalli as saying.
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 Kurdistan Region, petrol costs twice as much.
Nineveh governor Nejm al-Jibbouri said on Thursday that “information” suggested that the petrol shortage is due to “smuggling” towards Kurdistan, according to AFP.
He told a local television network that he had instructed security forces to “tighten checks at checkpoints to prevent petrol from leaving the province”, AFP reported.
Nineveh received more than two million liters of petrol a day, “the highest amount after Baghdad”, AFP cited Ihsan Mussa Ghanem, deputy head of the Iraqi agency in charge of distributing petroleum products, as saying.
“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,” he said.
