Iraqi Kurdistan vs. Big Oil

In 2009, Greg Muttitt, the author of Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq, visited a town near Duhok, where locals were grappling with Hunt Oil. “It was the beginning of the whole rash of contracts,” he told me over the phone. “What I expected to find was some degree of prosperity from the jobs that oil drilling brought… What I found was a community completely cut off from the oil field, which was surrounded by rings of security just outside of town.