BAGHDAD, 27 May 2006 — Iraq’s new government risks being held to ransom by a dissident Shiite faction using its local clout in Basra to hobble vital oil exports, Iraqi officials and senior political sources said yesterday.

They warned that the locally powerful Fadhila party was threatening to have members in the oil industry stage a go-slow to halt exports through the key southern oil port if it did not win the concessions it wanted from Baghdad.

“Fadhila is in control,” a senior Shiite political source close to the party said. Turf wars among Iraq’s ruling Shiite parties have long made its second city a confusing battleground for rival militias, leaving the British forces nominally in charge of Basra hoping that the new government can finally impose order.

Instead, the small Fadhila, which controls the governor’s office and parts of the local oil industry but which refused to join Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s Cabinet, risks turning the tables on Baghdad by turning off its cash lifeline.

“He who owns Basra owns the oil reserves. It is the gateway to the Gulf,” the Shiite political source said. “It’s the richest city in the world. It has a strategic position so why would any one give it up?”

The power struggle over Basra’s oil goes to the fractious heart of the United Iraqi Alliance, the bloc of Shiite Islamist parties that controls a near-majority in Parliament and will shape Iraq’s future for years, with or without US occupation. Maliki’s Dawa party, the SCIRI group and followers of cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr dominate the Alliance in Baghdad. Fadhila refused to join the government when Maliki took the Oil Ministry from it and handed it to an independent, Hussain Al-Shahristani.

Shahristani in turn has vowed to centralize control of oil in Baghdad and crack down hard on corruption and oil smuggling, which officials say are endemic in the southern oilfields.

Meanwhile, violence continued to rock Iraq with ten corpses bearing fatal bullet wounds found in Basra yesterday, security sources in the city’s police department confirmed.

The corpses were found in the Al-Moqal district of Basra yesterday morning, a source in the Basra police department said. The corpses were discovered with their hands bound and bore evidence of torture along with fatal bullet wounds to their heads.

Another four corpses were found in Al-Maqdadiya, 100 kilometers northeast of Baghdad, yesterday morning. Elsewhere in Iraq, unidentified armed men dressed in Iraqi Army uniforms raided homes in the town of Buhrez, 5 kilometers south of Baquba. The raids took place near the Al Diyali radio station building. Two members of the Iraqi police force were killed and six of the radio station’s employees were kidnapped during the raids.

Meanwhile, US armed forces shot dead three firefighters in Ramadi, 110 kilometers west of Baghdad. In a separate incident a member of the Iraqi police force was killed and four others wounded in Kirkuk, 250 kilometers north of Baghdad. Three car bombs shook Baghdad yesterday morning killing at least eight Iraqis and injuring at least another 30. One car bomb was detonated near a bus stop in the Al Nahda Square in central Baghdad, another car bomb went off in the Al Mansur district, while a third car bomb was detonated in the Al Bayaa district.