VIENNA, Austria AFX - Iraq will bolster its military presence in the oil-rich north of the country, where saboteurs and insurgents repeatedly have targeted workers, pipelines and facilities, the Iraqi oil minister said today.
"We already have a military presence there and we're going to reinforce it," Hussain al-Shahristani told reporters at a meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Iraq's northern oil fields produced an estimated 8.5 mln barrels of crude in July, former Iraqi oil minister Ibrahim Mohammad Bahr Al Olom said last week.
But repeated attacks on oil workers and infrastructure have made it difficult for the country to lift production back to prewar levels of about 2.5 mln to 3 mln bpd.
On Monday, gunmen in two cars ambushed a bus carrying oil employees in northern Iraq, killing four and injuring another, police said.
The bus had been taking the employees from Beiji, the country's biggest refinery, 155 miles north of Baghdad, to Tuz Khormato district, some 75 miles southeast of Beiji, on Sunday night, police Capt. Khalid Sabah said.
Iraq now is pumping between 2.3 mln and 2.4 mln barrels a day "and we're going to increase it", al-Shahristani said.
The nation is excluded from OPEC's production quota of 28 mln bpd.
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