FROM the day of the fall of Saddam Hussein, getting the oil industry producing again to pay for Iraq’s reconstruction has been a key priority.

Sabotage in the regime’s last days, insurgent attacks on infrastructure, sky-high security costs and now a political crisis, with the country threatening to slip into civil war, have severely hampered progress.

Iraqis complain that in one of the most oil-rich lands on Earth they must wait for hours, even days, to fill their fuel tanks in queues at petrol stations that are sometimes targeted by bombers.

One of the greatest humiliations of today’s Iraq is the oft-repeated refrain that petrol must be imported from neighbouring countries — mostly Kuwait — because its refining capacity is still so inadequate.

Carefully targeted damage was inflicted by sabotage squads to the nation’s already antiquated oil industry as Western tanks rolled into Iraq. Replacing destroyed parts has been achieved with great difficulty, by scouring Eastern Europe.

What progress has been made so far in rebuilding has been hampered by insurgents trying to stop reconstruction. They repeatedly have targeted oil pipelines, installations and workers with rocket, mortar and roadside bomb attacks, despite the fact that many of the country’s oil-producing areas are in relatively quiet areas of the Kurdish north and Shia south.

The Iraqi Oil Ministry has its own security forces, but they are stretched too thin to guard hundreds of miles of pipelines effectively.

Now reconstruction faces a new threat — civil war, as Sunni and Shia groups jockey for power. Hundreds have died at the hands of death squads and bombers in the past two weeks since a Shia mosque was damaged in a bomb attack. Dire warnings that the killings could spiral out of control have raised the prospect of anarchy on the streets.

The politicians elected in December were supposed to bring order and new hope of a stable, democratic future. Instead, they have yet to form a government and are in deadlock over the majority Shia choice of prime minister. Kurdish parties, who hold the balance of power, and Sunnis have objected to the Shia choice of Ibrahim Jaafari, whom they accuse of being ineffective and too close to hardline Shia militias. Mr Jaafari is also blamed for failing to stop the bloodletting of the past couple of weeks.

Iraq’s Western backers had hoped that a new government would bring order and unite Iraqis to end the insurgency. Instead, the fear now is that they may not be able to resolve their differences before rival militias and ethnic groups fight it out on the streets, even raising the prospect of a complete political and security meltdown.

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