Insurgents have succeeded in crippling Iraq's energy industry and the government has ignored calls for help in the battle against corruption and smuggling, the oil ministry's inspector general said on Tuesday.
"It has been going on for two or three years now without stopping. Actually it (the rebel campaign) has increased. They have always succeeded in attacking very sensitive sites," Ali al-Alaak told Reuters in an interview.
"Every time we fix the problems because of those attacks, the next day or a few days later they can attack the same site."
Asked if rebels had crippled Iraq's energy industry, he said: "Yes".
Speaking after he released a grim report on Iraq's oil sector, Alaak expressed frustration at what he said was the government's neglect of problems repeatedly raised to the prime minister's office.
"We have taken these problems to the highest authorities and nothing was done. Perhaps they were busy with other problems," he said. "I have sent them reports three or four times. There have been no changes."
With its huge oil reserves, Iraq stands in the same league as other oil powerhouses such as Saudi Arabia and Iran.
But poor management in the face of pipeline explosions and graft threaten to sink its oil sector deeper after years of wars and United Nations sanctions under Saddam Hussein, Alaak said.
Iraq's oil industry is locked in a vicious cycle where rebel bombings of pipelines and refineries force the state to import oil products, which are then smuggled on their way in and sold in a vast black market.
"We are really losing billions," said Alaak, who was appointed by the oil minister in 2004 for five years and said he was not linked to any political party.
"One of the reasons for that is we could not do anything about so many important projects. We have done, I think, about 30 or 35 percent of what we had listed for 2005. This is really a big problem. Some of them were related directly to production and exports and we have done nothing."
Alaak, who said he received several death threats from insurgents, stressed that a lack of reliable forces and technology to protect pipelines was contributing to the turmoil.
"We have a force of about 100,000. How many of them are reliable? I don't know," he said in his office on the first floor of the Ministry of Oil, a concrete structure sealed off from traffic by concrete barriers against bombs.
Alaak spoke of an export pipeline in the south that had been bombed in previous wars and badly needed work.