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Iraqs semi-autonomous Kurdish government approved plans to create an oil exploration and production company separate from the central government and a sovereign wealth fund to take in all energy revenue.

A bill to create the company for oil exploration and production, with shares to be sold to the public, was approved by the cabinet of the Kurdistan Regional Government, Kurdish Prime Minister Nechirvian Barzani said in a statement yesterday. A separate initiative approved by the cabinet would create a Kurdish fund for oil and gas revenue. Both draft laws need to be approved by the KRGs parliament.

The KRG, which started crude oil exports by pipeline through Turkey this year, wants to control sales of oil pumped from fields in the Kurdish region in the north of Iraq to boost its financial independence from the central government in Baghdad. The Kurdish region holds 45 billion barrels of oil reserves, while the rest of Iraq has 150 billion barrels, the worlds fifth-largest known deposits.

The new company will oversee all the oil and gas sectors, for example, the signing of contracts for oil exploration, extraction, development, investment, export and marketing, Barzani said in the statement. This company can become within a limited time a shareholding company, and all the citizens can buy shares in it.

The Kurds were producing 320,000 barrels of oil a day in October, Sherko Jawdat, head of the natural resources committee in the Kurdish regions parliament, said Oct. 2. The remainder of the country produced 3.3 million barrels a day last month.

Iraqs Kurdish enclave is set to produce 1 million barrels a day of oil by the end of 2015, the regional government said in a Nov. 7 statement. It plans to export 500,000 barrels a day via neighboring Turkey by the end of March, it said. The Kurds exported 300,000 barrels a day in the first week of November.

The Kurds efforts to sell crude separately from the central government has provoked legal action by authorities in Baghdad and fanned speculation that the semi-autonomous region will pursue greater independence.

Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM), Chevron Corp. (CVX) and Total SA (FP) are among companies caught in the dispute between the KRG and the central government over land and oil revenue. The Kurds stopped exporting crude via Iraqs national pipeline system in December 2012 and began operating their own link to Turkey this year. The central government has suspended payments to the Kurds from the national budget.

To contact the reporter on this story: Khalid Al-Ansary in Baghdad at kalansary@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Nayla Razzouk at nrazzouk2@bloomberg.net Claudia Carpenter, Bruce Stanley

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Iraq Kurds Cabinet Approves Plan for Starting Oil Company

Kurdish leaders in Iraq have quietly expanded a request to Washington for sophisticated arms and protective equipment to battle the Islamic State, but American officials have so far rebuffed the appeals out of concerns about defying the Iraqi government, according to Kurdish officials.

The Obama administrations reluctance to directly arm the Kurdish forces underscores the challenges the United States faces in Iraq, where it is seeking to expand its effort to help Iraqi forces combat militants without upsetting a fragile political balance between the countrys Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

A Kurdish official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss official communications, said Kurdish leaders had presented the Pentagon with an expanded request for U.S. equipment, including mine-resistant armored vehicles and technology to counter improvised explosive devices, such as bomb-defusing robots.

The peshmerga, as the militia forces of northern Iraqs semiautonomous Kurdish region are known, have had some success retaking territory that Islamic State militants seized this summer. But now, Kurdish officials say, the modestly equipped Kurdish force is struggling to respond to the evolving tactics of militants who are increasingly using explosive booby traps and roadside bombs to defend the territory they hold.

The fighting changed. The style changed, the Kurdish official said. We started to ask for heavier military equipment.

Navy Cmdr. Elissa Smith, a spokeswoman for the Defense Department, said the Pentagon had responded to the new Kurdish request on Oct.15, promising to review it and urging leaders of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to coordinate their requests with the Iraqi government in Baghdad.

Smith said that a coalition of countries allied against the Islamic State had already provided more than 2million pounds of equipment to help the KRG defend its territory. Most of that has gone through the central government in Baghdad, U.S. officials say.

Support for all of Iraqs security forces, including Kurdish elements, will be critical to defeating this threat, Smith said.

But Kurdish officials say the supplies they have received have comprised only light and medium arms, including ammunition, automatic weapons and artillery rounds. They say heavy arms are needed to combat an adversary such as the Islamic State, which seized large quantities of U.S.-made weapons and equipment abandoned by Iraqi soldiers as the militants advanced this summer.

While U.S. officials have led coordination of the international effort to supply the peshmerga, they have not yielded to Kurdish requests for heavier and more sophisticated U.S.-made military gear.

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Iraqs Kurds appeal for new U.S. arms to combat Islamic State

Baghdad, Iraq Iraq's prime minister on Wednesday ordered his first major shakeup of his military since taking office three months ago, relieving 26 army officers of their commands and retiring 10 others as a monitoring group said airstrikes by a US-led coalition against the so-called Islamic State and other extremists in neighboring Syria have killed more than 860 people, including civilians, since they began in September.

The Iraqi military shakeup, which included the appointment of 18 new commanders, was ordered "as part of efforts to reinforce the work of the military on the basis of professionalism and fighting graft in all its forms," according to a statement posted on Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's official website.

"The aim is not to punish anyone, but rather to improve our military performance," Mr. Abadi later said in comments to senior army officers.

A government official said the shakeup followed the findings of a probe ordered last month by Abadi on corruption in the military. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Under Iraq's constitution, Abadi, like Nouri al-Maliki before him, holds the post of general commander of the Armed Forces. But it was Mr. Maliki, now a vice president, who had tightly controlled the military during his eight-year rule, with several elite units taking their orders directly from him.

Maliki, in the final months of his administration, had spoken at length about corruption in the military particularly in the wake of an embarrassing rout of Iraqi forces which saw IS militants capture about a third of the country in a few months. He cited cases where soldiers paid half their salary to their commanders so they could stay away from their units and work a second job. He also relieved several top commanders from their command and ordered others investigated for dereliction of duty.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, meanwhile, said Wednesday that the vast majority of the more than 860 people killed in coalition airstrikes in Syria 746 people were Islamic State militants, while another 68 were members of Al Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front. At least 50 civilians, including eight children and five women, also have been killed in the airstrikes, the group said.

The US-led coalition's aerial campaign in Syria began before dawn on Sept. 23 in what President Barack Obama has called an effort to roll back and ultimately destroy the IS group. The militant extremist group has been the primary target of the coalition's strikes, although on at least two occasions the United States has targeted what it says is a specific cell within the Nusra Front allegedly plotting attacks against American interests.

In northern Syria, meanwhile, Kurdish forces defending the town of Kobane from Islamic State militants took control of much of a strategic hill overlooking the town, local official Idriss Nassan and Kurdish fighter Dalil Boras said.

Nassan also said the Kurds managed to secure a road on the southeastern side of the town that the Islamic State had used to ferry supplies and reinforcements to its fighters besieging Kobane.

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Islamic State roundup: An Iraq military shakeup, and the US air strikes' toll

Expanded U.S. Role In Iraq - Fox News Sunday Panel
President Obama Orders More Troops - debated on Fox News Sunday The use of media materials is protected by the Fair Use Clause of the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 which allows for the rebroadcast.

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Expanded U.S. Role In Iraq - Fox News Sunday Panel - Video

George W. Bush discusses his father, Jeb in 2016, and the Iraq War
Former President George W. Bush sat down for an interview with CBS News #39; Bob Schieffer at his presidential library in Dallas, Texas.

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George W. Bush discusses his father, Jeb in 2016, and the Iraq War - Video