BAGHDAD (AP)--Iraq's oil minister Sunday said that oil contracts signed by the self-rule Kurdish region were illegal and that the companies involved had been told so by the Iraqi government.
"No region has the right to go it alone and sign a deal," he said. "This will lead to the breakup of Iraq...oil is the business of the federal government and any attempt at extracting oil without the approval of the federal government is tantamount to smuggling," Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani, using unusually strong language, told Iraqi state television late Sunday.
Jamal Abdullah, a spokesman for the regional government of Iraqi Kurdistan, said al-Shahristani's comments were unwarranted.
"No one has the right to slander the legitimacy of contracts signed by the government of Kurdistan and the foreign companies," Abdullah said.
Lawmakers have clashed over Kurdish oil deals with foreign companies and engaged in heated exchanges over a draft bill that would allow thousands of former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party to return to their government jobs. Both measures are among the 18 benchmarks set by U.S. President George W. Bush's administration to encourage reconciliation.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte Sunday pressed leaders of Iraq's religious and ethnic factions to take advantage of recent security gains to push through legislation aimed at cementing national reconciliation or risk a return to greater violence.
"The security surge has delivered significant results, now progress on political reconciliation including key national legislation as well as economic advances is needed to consolidate the gains made thus far," Negroponte said at a news conference in Baghdad. "If progress is not made on these fronts we risk falling back to the more violent patterns of the past."
The mutilated bodies of four guards at an oil facility who were kidnapped at a checkpoint on their way back from vacation were found north of Baghdad on Monday, said Col. Khali al-Zubaie, a spokesman for the Iraqi army in Kirkuk. A fifth man who disappeared with them remained missing, he said.
Thousands of Iraqis have disappeared as a result of a Sunni-led insurgency and sectarian violence since Saddam Hussein's 2003 ouster.