Why Kurds vs. Arabs Could Be Iraq's Next Civil War

With a projected capacity of about 40,000 barrels a day, the new oil refinery inaugurated Saturday by the Kurdish regional government of northern Iraq on Saturday is modest even by the standards of Iraq’s dilapidated oil industry. But its significance shouldn’t be underestimated: In Kurdish minds, the region’s ability to refine the oil it pumps is a vital step towards deepening its autonomy from the Arab-majority remainder of Iraq.

Until recently, Iraqi Kurdistan had no refineries of its own, and though the area is sitting on a huge pool of oil, it had to rely on gasoline supplies from elsewhere in Iraq, Turkey or Iran. Fearful of giving Iraq’s ethnic Kurdish minority any control over the country’s most precious resource, Saddam Hussein had not only declined to build refineries in the region; he made sure Iraq’s oil pipelines bypassed Kurdish areas, and his army forcibly removed much of the Kurdish population of from Kirkuk