Nineveh Governorate, with its center in the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, is experiencing a fuel shortage, and long queues have been recorded in front of stations, in a scene that has been repeated for days, while officials said that the cause of the crisis was "smuggling" of fuel to the neighboring Kurdistan region of Iraq.
For about a week, dozens of cars have been queuing daily for hours in front of petrol stations in Mosul, while army personnel were guarding the stations on Friday.
Taxi driver Abdul-Khaleq al-Mawsili complained about this situation as he was standing waiting for his yellow car to be filled with fuel. "We spend our whole lives in front of gas stations and in queues, it has become a routine," he said.
Another taxi driver, Marwan Sabah, said, "There is a fuel crisis and congestion. It has become a burden for the poor citizen."
Nineveh Governorate is witnessing intermittently a fuel shortage crisis, despite the fact that the substance is subsidized by the government, as a liter of gasoline is sold at about 500 dinars (or 33 cents of a dollar) in the governorate.
But it is more than twice as expensive in the neighboring Kurdistan region, which has been autonomous since 1991.
Mosul, which was under the control of the Islamic State between 2014 and 2017, and large parts of it are still destroyed, is located about an hour and a half from Erbil (the center of the Kurdistan region), and there are security points between the two cities to monitor traffic between them for security reasons.
Speaking about the gasoline crisis in Mosul, Nineveh Governor Najm al-Jubouri, in a television interview on Thursday, referred to "information" that "part of these products may be a victim of smuggling."
He stressed that he had given instructions to the security forces to tighten "controls" (security points) in order "that no oil products would leave the province."
Another queue for cars to refuel in Mosul (French)
Nineveh governorate receives daily more than two million liters of fuel, which is the highest allocated share after Baghdad governorate, according to Ihsan Musa Ghanem, assistant general manager of the Oil Products Distribution Company, noting that "there is no crisis in Nineveh Governorate."
He said that the high prices of gasoline in the Kurdistan region compared to other Iraqi regions put pressure on Nineveh Governorate, because many people from the regions of the region adjacent to the province come to it to refuel.
He added that "the rise in prices leads to the transfer of fuel from the lowest-priced areas (Nineveh Governorate) to the more expensive governorates (Kurdistan Region)."
Iraq has huge reserves of oil, as it is the second largest exporter in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) with a volume of 3.5 million barrels per day, and oil represents 90% of its revenues.