baghdad • Aside from bombings, Iraqis have an extra concern every winter — stocking enough amounts of home heating oil in preparation for the four-month-long cold season, which usually ranges from chilly to frosty across Iraq’s cities.

Even in the country with the third largest oil reserves in the world, poorer people have trouble finding sufficient energy resources to keep going especially as December approaches.

“In the past years we have lived through incidents and events that could not cross people’s mind in a country that floats over crude oil,” said 51-year-old Hassan Hady of the troubles Iraqis face during fuel shortages.

“But at least this year there is more oil available in the stations, unlike previous years,” added Hady, holding his ration card’s “white oil” vouchers as he queued up among hundreds of Baghdadis at a fuel station on Palestine Street to get his winter’s quota of heating oil.

People in Baghdad, however, might be among the luckiest this year. The petroleum product used by people to heat their homes, usually by fuelling building furnaces, is not available across other areas in Iraq where according to Oil Minister Hussein Shahristani, “the quotas of white oil were distributed in most cities but delayed in Ramadi and Baquba where the security status is volatile”.

In Iraq’s winter, continuous rainfall is not uncommon especially in the south while snow often falls on the northern edges of Baquba and Kirkuk in addition to the mountainous areas in the north. In central Iraq, 10 degrees celsius is the average temperature but on higher ground it’s usually colder.

With constant power cuts, the winter is ever gloomy and Iraqi families use their 200 litres of fuel to get on with their lives until the stock is consumed. Then black markets — where the “white oil” price reaches its all-year high — provide the alternative.

Even with a surge in oil production, reported by the government to have reached 2.3 million barrels per day, an abundance of oil for the benefit of the Iraqi people is still a remote possibility. Many of the existing oil fields have not been utilised since the 1970s. But the biggest problems remain to be terrorist attacks targeting the oil business, in addition to corruption and oil smuggling from across Iraq, over the borders and into neighbouring countries.