The fires in the oil wells of the Khabbaz field, about 20 kilometers southwest of Kirkuk city and in an area controlled by the Kurdish Peshmerga, have been burning since a May 4 attack blamed on ISIS.
“The fires are still burning and we might not be able to control them by the end of this month,” Farhad Hamza, chief engineers at the North Oil Company in Kirkuk told Rudaw English.
“Up to 4,000 barrels of oil are wasting daily,” he said, adding the damage may be even greater.
Hamza said past experience had shown that the wells may be beyond repair, even when the fires are extinguished.
“Some of these wells will die even after the fire is controlled. Then we just cover them with cement,” he explained.
“We need to control the fire first and then see what happened to the well. Then we can say if the wells can be repaired. We don’t know yet, but if they died the damage will be much greater than it is now.”
“The damage is twofold – both economic and environmental from the blazing fires,” he said. “This will hurt livestock and farmland in the area.”
The oil wells were set ablaze in a suspected sabotage attack.
Kirkuk police chief Sarhad Qadir said at the time that four wells had been booby trapped, but one did not catch fire and another was saved because the explosives failed to detonate.
He said that no arrests had been made but that two ISIS leaders were from the village near the wells. ISIS attacked the same facility in January 2015.
