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Lee Wolfgram (center) in Ukraine (Supplied)

(FOX 9) - A Twin Cities attorney and retired military veteran recently returned from the trip of a lifetime to assist a fellow soldier in Ukraine. The two served side-by-side in Iraq. This time around, the Minnesotan flew into a war zone to help the Ukrainian get his critical life possessions out of harms way.

"I was using my military training to assist a military friend. I guess that's how I would characterize it," Lee Wolfgram explained to FOX 9s Paul Blume. "You know that the mission was playing like a military operation. It was coordinated like a military operation, had objectives, like a military operation. So we just executed like we would if we were on official duty with the benefit of having the freedom of on being my own commander."

A Twin Cities attorney and retired military veteran recently returned from the trip of a lifetime to assist a fellow soldier in Ukraine. The two served side-by-side in Iraq. And this Minnesotan just flew into a war zone to help the Ukrainian get his critical life possessions out of harms way.

Wolfgram documented his mission on his Facebook page with various video clips from the journey. In one video, air raid sirens can be heard with explosions going off within a couple miles of their location.

Wolfgram is seen with a couple of Ukrainian soldiers over dinner, trying to keep the moment light, "I think if we werent soldiers, wed be running for the basement."

While serving with a multinational force in Iraq nearly 20 years ago, Wolfgram formed a lifelong bond with several fellow soldiers including a Ukrainian Wolfgram will only identify by his rank and first name for security reasons, Lieutenant Colonel Borys. He reports that Borys served as his interpreter.

"Yeah, my battle buddy, you know. The same guy that stood by me in Iraq. You know, I was really emotional about the fact that when I went to Iraq, this guy showing up next to me and now he's in trouble and he needs help. And he had just mentioned to me his concerns, and I'm like, I think we could develop a plan. I think we could do this. And so that's where the concept of the operation came from."

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Wolfgram said Borys was able to get his family including a wife and young son out of danger, via train to the Netherlands in northwestern Europe.

But only with what they could pack in a couple of suitcases.

Borys, who is from Odessa, the major port city in the south of Ukraine, remained behind to do his part and defend the country.

"These people are like anybody else that you would meet a friend. You know, they've got jobs, they've got children's school, you know, all that stuff. They're just like us, you know, so they get up in the morning, go to work like everybody else. And then one day the whole country is being attacked, you know? So it's yeah, it's terribly sad to see all of that," Wolfgram said.

While Odessa has remained relatively safe from the deadly onslaught playing out elsewhere across Ukraine, Borys wanted to get his car and critical valuables to his loved ones some 1,500 miles away given the unpredictability of the war.

And thats where Wolfgram came in.

He found an open week in his schedule after a court case settled and mapped out the operation. He took off from MSP, eventually finding his way to Moldova, and a bus journey across fortified borders and armed checkpoints, before reconnecting with his long-time friend in Odessa for a quick overnight.

They then packed up Borys car and made a 40-plus hour trek across the heart of Europe.

Wolfgram described the reunion near the Dutch city of Utrecht as priceless.

"It was a wrap your arms and twirl around kind of thing," said Wolfgram. "Really great to see. And they were very happy, of course."

In one final touching twist, Borys loved ones are staying with another fellow soldier from the joint-multinational deployment in Iraq, a Dutch family.

Wolfgram flew home to Minneapolis on Wednesday. Borys apparently had a 10-day pass to make this reunion with his family and take care of personal affairs. At last report, he was on his way back to Ukraine and his military duties.

"I do realize it was a pretty bold move," concluded Wolfgram, about his whirlwind trek to help a fellow soldier and friend. "But it was the timing. That's when it had to happen. It wasn't really all we had planned for that, and it had to happen, and it went off well."

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Twin Cities man flies to Ukraine to help fellow soldier he fought with in Iraq - FOX 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul

A dust storm has swept through much of Iraq, leaving dozens of people in hospital with respiratory problems, a health ministry spokesperson said on Saturday.

The storm formed in the north of the country on Thursday, prompting the cancellation of flights serving Erbil, capital of the autonomous Kurdistan region.

As the storm swept south, it shrouded Baghdad and cities as far south as Nasiriyah in a ghostly orange.

In the capital, buildings and vehicles were covered in ochre-coloured dust, Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists reported.

The storm has caused dozens of hospitalisations across Iraq due to respiratory problems, health ministry spokesperson Saif al-Badr told AFP.

The director of Iraqs meteorological office, Amer al-Jabri, said that while dust storms were not uncommon in Iraq, they were becoming more frequent due to drought, desertification and declining rainfall.

Iraq is particularly vulnerable to climate breakdown, and has experience record low rainfall and high temperatures in recent years.

Experts have said these factors threaten social and economic disaster in the war-scarred country.

In November, the World Bank warned that Iraq could suffer a 20% drop in water resources by 2050 due to the climate crisis.

See the original post here:
Dozens hospitalised as Iraq engulfed by dust storm | Iraq | The Guardian

On May 12, 2018, Iraqis went to the polls to elect a new government. Then, as now, political maneuvering consumed months as Iraqis sought first to select a speaker, then a president, and finally a prime minister. Behind the scenes, individuals and party leaders engaged in political horse-trading and brinkmanship, while diplomats from Washington and Tehran sought to ensure that candidates more sympathetic to their interests, if not worldview, found their way into top positions.

During the struggle to form a new government in 2018, Brett McGurk was the U.S. special envoy to counter the Islamic State. But, by dint of his experience in Iraq and personal relationships with Iraqi politicians across the political spectrum, President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo relied on him to shape U.S. Iraq policy. While the Americans, Europeans, Arabs, and Iranians all largely agreed that Barham Salih was the most capable and politically moderate candidate, McGurk urged Iraqi politicians to choose Fuad Hussein, chief of staff to Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Masoud Barzani. Fuads achievements were negligible, and Iraqis perceived his capabilities as lackluster. According to Iraqis present in the meetings, McGurks reasoning was that picking anyone besides Barzanis man would lead Barzani to undermine the broader Iraqi system. This was no idle concern; the year before, Barzani, his uncle, Hoshyar Zebari, and his son Masrour had held an independence referendum across both Iraqi Kurdistan and disputed territories claimed by both Baghdad and Erbil.

For almost twenty years, the State Department has allowed its fear of Barzanis intransigence to shape American policy in Iraq. In the era of the Coalition Provisional Authority, some current and former U.S. government officials used their contacts in the State Department or Pentagon to run interference for the Barzanis while simultaneously pursuing their own personal business interests. Many other diplomats and military officersa notable exception being David Petraeus, the commander of the 101st Airborne at the timewould undermine or soft-pedal efforts to instill democracy or punish corruption for fear of upsetting Barzani.

While other Iraqi political leaders would meet high-profile American leaders in Baghdad, Barzani demanded they visit him at his cliff-top palace complex outside of Erbil. The fact that many did allowed Barzani to depict Americans as supplicants. Ironically, assuaging Barzani in this way only increased his ego and sense of entitlement.

This deference to Barzani did not serve U.S. interests. Russian firms benefited disproportionately from Kurdish oil, and both Masoud and Nechirvan Barzani leaked word of impending operations to Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Masrour Barzanithe regional governments current prime ministeris best known among U.S. intelligence authorities for pestering them on citizenship issues for family members and requests for other inappropriate personal favors.

Nor has this deference brought regional stability. Nearly two decades after Saddams fall, Iraq needs talent. Barzanis nepotismand U.S. deference to itundercuts recognition of that talent by signaling that only the Barzanis are capable. This is one of the reasons why, in November 2021, so many Iraqi Kurds traveled to Belarusmany dying en routein order to try to cross into Poland. Likewise, those who drowned in the English Channel last November were not refugees fleeing war, but rather Iraqi Kurds seeking to escape the Barzanis regime of corruption. It is quite telling when supporters of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose followers often engage in corruption, criticize Sadr for the unseemliness of a political alliance with a family as corrupt as the Barzanis.

To look at the problem from the opposite perspective, it is clear that a willingness to stand up to the Barzanis at any point from 2003 to the present would have very likely bolstered Iraqs stability. There are legitimate reasons to criticize Barham Salihthe people of Sulaymaniyah, his hometown, are not shy about doing sobut the United States is lucky that McGurks maneuvering failed in 2018. There is simply no way Fuad Hussein could have navigated Iraq through the crisis of nationwide protests, the aftermath of Qassem Suleimanis assassination, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Nor would he have been able to advance Iraq on the world stage in the way that Barham did. Moreover, Barzani proxies would have been unable to act and be accepted as an honest broker by Iraqs various sectarian, ethnic, and political constituencies, let alone Washington, Tehran, Abu Dhabi, and Ankara.

As McGurk, newly-confirmed ambassador to Iraq Alina Rominowski, and others in the White House, State Department, Pentagon, and CIA work to help Iraq secure itself and set itself on a trajectory for economic stability, it is essential that they stop allowing fear of Barzani intransigence undermine U.S. interests and Iraqs future. It is time to call Barzanis bluff and allow him to retire into the dustbin of history where he belongs.

Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Image: Reuters.

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The United States Must Stand Up to Barzani Blackmail in Iraq - The National Interest Online

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Original post:
It's not 2003 and Iraq all over again | Guest Column | wyomingnews.com - Wyoming Tribune

Like the first sparrow of spring, Iraqs reversal of all promises made to the U.S. in order to secure another waiver to import electricity and gas from still-sanctioned Iran is a regular and much-anticipated feature of the oil year for seasoned market watchers. This year has been no different. Some have interpreted the 120-day waiver, which is the equal longest granted to Iraq in years, as a tangential good-faith gesture to Iran by the U.S. as they attempt to agree on a new iteration of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, nuclear deal). This interpretation is unlikely to be correct, as Washington has not directly correlated the two issues for a considerable time. Rather, it seems that the 120-day waiver was made by the U.S. with the full knowledge that Iraq would break any pledges it made to secure it, and instead reflects a practical realization finally that it has to fight for any influence in the huge oil and gas reservoirs of Iraq against Chinas continued encroachment. Indeed, last week shortly after the award of the 120-day waiver - another huge hydrocarbons deal was awarded in Iraq to Chinese commercial interests. This latest deal an engineering, procurement, and construction contract worth at least US$412 million for a 130 million standard cubic feet per day natural gas processing facility in Basra was given out to a consortium of China CAMC Engineering Co (CAMCE) and CNOOC Petrochemical Engineering Co. (CNOOC Petrochemical Engineering) by the highly misleadingly named Kuwait Energy Basra Limited (KEBL). This company, in fact, is nothing much to do with Kuwait at all but rather is an indirect but wholly-owned subsidiary of Chinas United Energy Group (UEG). According to UEGs 2020 filings (but signed and filed on 27 July 2021 in Hong Kong on behalf of company chairman, Zhang Hong Wei), having acquired BP Pakistans assets (and renamed them United Energy Pakistan Limited), UEG then acquired Kuwait Energy Plc on 21 March 2019, since which time it has engaged in further upstream oil and gas business in Iraq and Egypt, as well as in Pakistan. Consequently, the award for the development of a critical piece of Iraqs hydrocarbons infrastructure in Iraq has been neatly and quietly given by one Chinese company to another Chinese company.

Related: Worlds Largest Oil Trader To Completely Phase Out Russian Crude According to UEGs 2020 Hong Kong filings, its own Kuwait Energy Basra Limited has been the operator of Iraqs Block 9 since 3 February 2013 for a basic term of 30 years, with the early production rate achieved on 31 January 2016. In the meantime, Kuwait Energy Iraq Ltd (KEIL) an operating unit of UEGs Kuwait Energy remains the operator of Iraqs Siba gas field, the contract for which was entered into 5 June 2011. The Siba gas field is the first non-associated gas field in Iraq and, as UEG notes: The indigenous gas production from Siba is considered by Iraq Government as one of the key strategic contributors to Iraqs energy needs and economic development. According to UEG, the Siba gas field development was completed, and the gas processing plant operation commenced in August 2018. This latest US412 million deal follows another even bigger deal between the same players in January of this year, in which a US$594 million engineering, procurement, and construction contract was given to the same consortium CAMCE and CNOOC Petrochemical Engineering by Kuwait Energy Basra Co for a 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) crude oil processing facility in Iraqs Block 9.

These deals, in turn, had followed swiftly on from the announcement in January that the Power Construction Corporation of China (PowerChina) signed a US$880 million engineering, procurement, and construction contract with Iraqs Missan International Refinery Company to build the 150,000 bpd Missan Refinery Project. According to local news reports in 2019, the Missan International Refinery Company itself was formed by a little-known Swiss-Chinese consortium comprised of Swiss industrial firm Satarem (15 percent share) and Chinas Wahan (85 percent share). The refinery project originally broke ground in 2016, with an estimated cost of US$6 billion, which, according to Iraqs then-Deputy Minister for Refining, Deiaa Jaafar, would be funded by the Export-Import Bank of China and China Development Bank. At the time, Iraq was looking to move ahead with another three refineries, in addition to Missan, comprising the 300,000 bpd Nassiriya refinery, the 150,000 bpd Kirkuk refinery, and the 140,000 bpd Karbala refinery. According to the comments from Iraqs Oil Ministry in January, this new iteration of the project will now be completed within the next 54 months.

Related: How Egypt Could Become A Critical Energy Hub

All of this Chinese activity occurred in parallel to the finalization again at the beginning of this year - of the 25-year deal for the China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec) to take a 49 percent share in the huge Mansuriya non-associated field, with the remainder held by Iraqs state-own Midland Oil Company. Extremely close to the Iranian border, and just north of Baghdad, the Mansuriya gas field has an estimated 4.5-4.6 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of gas in place, with plans to increase production to at least 320 million standard cubic feet (Mmscf) per day, making it a very valuable gas deposit in and of itself. Its broader significance is that Iraq had previously always sought to offer the three fields of Mansuriya, Akkas, and Siba together as one development package.

These three sites form a skewed triangle across southern Iraq, stretching from Mansuriya near the eastern border with Iran, down to Siba in the south (extremely close to the key Iraqi Basra export hub), and then all the way west across to Akkas (extremely close to the border with Syria). When Russia had been eyeing the development of the very same three fields, just before China took the figurative driving seat on the deals with a view presumably on what Russia was about to do in Ukraine, this triangle was to have been linked in with a transit route running all the way from Basra to Syria. Much of this route disappears into Iraqs lawless wasteland Anbar province, a place so violent and unpredictable that it was even avoided where possible by Islamic State. This route, what the U.S. military used to call the spine of the Islamic State, is where the Euphrates flows westwards into Syria and eastwards into the Persian Gulf, and is extremely close to the border with Iran.

It remains of vital strategic importance to Russian operations in Syria, including the Russian military Khmeimim Air Base near Latakia that functions alongside the civilian Bassel Al-Assad International Airport in Syria, while Latakia itself is also home to a key intelligence-gathering listening station operated by Russia. There are also plans by China, as analyzed in-depth in my new book on the global oil markets, to build its own intelligence-gathering listening station in Irans Chabahar, which will function as a core part of Beijings ongoing upgrading and rollout of its own C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) systems in the region. The overall plan, as exclusively highlighted by OilPrice.com at the time, before a more circumspect approach was taken (for the time being at least) in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, was for the Chabahar facility to be connected to Russias intelligence-gathering stations around its core military bases in Syria. This, in turn, would allow it to be easily tied into Russias Southern Joint Strategic Command 19th EW Brigade (Rassvet) near Rostov-on-Don, which itself links into the corollary Chinese systems.

Consequently, Iraqs playing both sides in the gas, oil, and refining sectors can be regarded as part of a much broader move by several major Middle Eastern oil and gas players including the once stalwart U.S. ally, Saudi Arabia to position themselves in the center of what is becoming an economically, politically, and militarily bipolar order rather than the U.S.-dominated world of the previous hundred years or so and before that the Great Britain-dominated one. The series of meetings in Beijingearlier this year between senior officials from the Chinese government and foreign ministers from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, and the secretary-general of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) underlined this. At these meetings, the principal topics of conversation were to finally seal a China-GCC Free Trade Agreement and deeper strategic cooperation in a region where U.S. dominance is showing signs of retreat,according to local news reports.

By Simon Watkins for Oilprice.com

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