On April 21, Ali Hussein Julood, a 21-year-old living in the Iraqi city of Rumaila, on the edge of one of the world’s largest oil fields, died of leukemia. Doctors told him that pollution from gas flared in the nearby field, operated by British Petroleum (BP), had probably caused his cancer.
“Gas flaring” is an inexpensive procedure used by oil companies to burn off the natural gas expelled during drilling. It wastes valuable natural resources, also contributes to global warming and causes dangerous air pollution associated with serious health problems in nearby populations. Some of the pollutants released during this process, such as benzene, are known to cause cancer and respiratory disease.
Ali, who had been battling cancer for six years when he died, was just the latest victim of the environmental degradation caused by international oil companies such as BP in Iraq. In towns and villages near the country’s vast oil fields, thousands of other men, women and children still live under smoke-filled skies and suffer avoidable health problems as corporate leaders insist on putting profit before life.
While there isn’t much publicly available data on the number of pollution-induced illnesses in areas near oil fields in southern Iraq, a confidential report from the Iraqi Ministry of Health recently obtained by the BBC, among other things, shows the pollution blamed gas flaring for a 20 percent increase in cancer in Basra, southern Iraq between 2015 and 2018. A second leaked document, seen again by the BBC, from the local government in Basra showed that cancer cases in the region three times higher than the figures published in the official nationwide cancer registry.
Like many other problems and crises devastating the lives of ordinary Iraqis today, the chain of events leading to the poisoning of southern Iraq’s airspace by international oil companies also began during colonial times.
In the early 20th century, as the navy moved from coal to petrol, Britain needed more and more oil to run its empire and fuel its numerous war effort. At the time, there was already a growing belief that Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq and parts of Syria) contained significant oil reservoirs, so British authorities focused their search for more oil there.
In 1912, Britain established the Turkish Petroleum Company (TPC) with the aim of acquiring concessions from the Ottoman Empire to explore for oil in Mesopotamia. After World War I, it brought modern-day Iraq under its own mandate and accelerated its efforts to claim the region’s vast reserves for its own.
In 1930, the TPC was renamed the Iraqi Petroleum Company (IPC) and came under the control of a consortium consisting of BP, Total, Shell, and several other American companies. Together they pushed for a series of “concession agreements” with the newly formed Iraqi government that would give them exclusive control of Iraq’s oil resources on predetermined terms for long periods. By 1938, the IPC and its various subsidiaries had already acquired the right to extract and export virtually all of Iraq’s oil for 75 years.
These concessions were granted to the IPC and its subsidiaries while Iraq was ruled by British-installed monarchs and under de facto British control. Thus, the state had almost no negotiating power against the British-led consortium, meaning it could not guarantee that the concessions were drafted in a way that served the interests of the Iraqi people. In the end, not only did the agreements not benefit Iraq in any way, but they also contained no provisions to protect local communities and the environment from the undesirable effects of oil extraction.
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Iraq’s first oil export pipeline was built in the north in the early 1930s, from the oil fields in Kirkuk to British-controlled Palestine. The development of the oil industry in the south, where Ali lived and died, began a few years later. In 1948, large amounts of oil were discovered by international oil companies in Zubair, southern Iraq. Within two years of the discovery, six oil wells were drilled in Zubair and a new pipeline was built to transport the oil from these new fields to the port in al-Faw. Around the same time, oil was found in Nahar Umr, and later, in 1953, one of the world’s largest oil fields, Rumailahad been discovered.
The development of the oil industry in southern Iraq quickly introduced the environmental risks associated with the extraction of oil in the region. As early as 1952, gas was being flared at Zubair in such large quantities that the night sky over the oil fields was visibly polluted.
In 1955, the Iraqi government began expressing its desire to use the flared gas at Rumaila and Zubair for electricity generation. In 1960, while negotiating a concession with the IPC, then Iraqi Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim formally asked the company to allow Iraq to exploit the gas it was not using. The same question came up again and again leading up to the nationalization of the Iraqi oil industry in 1972, but IPC and its subsidiaries repeatedly rejected the Iraqi government. They were reluctant to let Iraq use the excess natural gas expelled during oil extraction because flaring allows operators to depressurize their equipment and manage unpredictable and large pressure variations without increasing their production costs. To capture the gas instead of flaring it off, they would have to build in extra safety mechanisms, which would reduce the amount of oil they extract, and therefore their profits.
Iraq nationalized its oil industry in 1972 and by 1990 had built up the capacity to capture 95 percent of the natural gas expelled from drilling. However, some of this infrastructure was destroyed due to sanctions and subsequent wars, leaving Iraq unable to store and use the gas, ending extensive flaring and reducing pollution.
After the 2003 invasion, the Iraqi oil industry was again privatized under pressure from the US and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). As was the case in the early 20th century, all oil extraction rights negotiations took place when Iraq was still under foreign occupation and gripped by ethno-sectarian conflict, meaning the state had little power to protect the rights and interests of the protect local population.
When the process of auctioning oil fields in southern Iraq began in 2008, the Iraqi government offered foreign oil companies long contracts up to 25 years, reminiscent of the early concession agreements with the IPC. These included stabilization clauses, which insulated foreign companies from legal changes that could arise over the course of their contracts. This meant that the companies were and remain unaffected by any environmental regulations passed by the Iraqi government to reduce pollution or bring Iraqi laws into line with emerging international environmental protection standards.
Looking back at the development of the oil industry in southern Iraq, it appears that the kind of pollution that killed Ali has been some 70 years in the making. His death—like the deaths of many others who succumbed to pollution-induced cancers in his country—was not an inevitable tragedy, but the natural consequence of a long history of colonial violence and extractive capitalism.
Predatory colonial practices that began more than a century ago meant that today the vast oil reserves of southern Iraq came under the sole control of foreign companies – companies that time and again profit for the lives of the Iraqi residents of the region. land they exploit.
Ali’s death is yet another proof that colonial violence is far from over and that it has many different faces. Today, the settlers are murdering the peoples of the Global South not only with drones and bombs, but also with age-old extraction practices that are gradually poisoning their homeland.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial view of Al Jazeera.