Al-Musawi dived behind the dashboard. ''My response was faster than theirs,'' he said. One round hit his driver's arm; the other 19 riddled the car's headrests and front seats.
Al-Musawi survived that ambush a year ago, another attempt on his life a day later and two others last winter. The gunmen then spied an easier target: Last spring, al-Musawi's 20-year-old son, Haider, died in a hail of bullets in front of his family's house in Baghdad.
Insurgents kill with numbing regularity in Iraq, but al-Musawi doubts that either he or his son were victims of insurgent attacks.
Al-Musawi is one of a small group of reform-minded Iraqi oil officials who have fought tenaciously to reform Iraq's corrupt oil sector. Their crusading has created a new hit list in Iraq, the product of an evolving underworld of smugglers and corrupt officials siphoning millions of dollars from Iraq's oil wealth.
''Corruption sometimes destroys more than terrorists do,'' al-Musawi said in an interview at his home in Baghdad.
Corruption in Iraq's oil sector looms as one of the biggest threats to the country's economy, yet it largely has gone unaddressed since the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime in April 2003. In testimony before the U.S. Senate's Foreign Relations Committee in July, RAND Corp. senior economist Keith Crane said it is estimated that a third of Iraqi imports of gasoline and diesel fuel is stolen annually, which this year will cost the country roughly $2 billion.
A report released earlier this year by the auditing firm KPMG disclosed that $69 million in oil produced in Iraq during the second half of 2004 disappeared, sparking concern it had been smuggled.
''People in government, or with government ties, are making hundreds of millions of dollars from the current situation,'' Crane said in a recent interview. ''And they don't want to see that changed.''
As a result, money earmarked for crucial reconstruction projects disappears, a fragile, one-commodity economy stagnates and a restive, war-weary public grows increasingly mistrustful of its fledgling government.
Corruption has racked Iraq's oil sector for years. Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Saddam parlayed the United Nations' oil-for-food program into $1.8 billion in kickbacks. The seven-year, $64 billion program provided food and medical supplies to impoverished Iraqis to ease the impact of harsh U.N. sanctions.
At the heart of the Iraqi oil sector's struggle with corruption today is the country's policy of subsidizing fuel prices.
With most of postwar Iraq still mired in poverty, the Iraqi government continues to subsidize fuel, setting gasoline prices at about a nickel a gallon. In neighboring countries, gasoline prices range from nearly $2 a gallon in Jordan and Syria and more than $5 in Turkey.
The wide gap in prices has spawned bands of creative, well-connected smugglers who steal fuel imports intended for Iraqi consumption so they can be sold in Turkey, Jordan and other neighboring states.
In his Senate testimony, Crane called liberalizing gasoline and diesel prices ''the single most important economic policy change needed in Iraq today.''
Eliminating fuel subsidies would remove the incentive for smuggling, says Ali al-Allaq, inspector general for Iraq's Oil Ministry. But such a move carries risk; it could draw fierce protests at a time when sectarian divisiveness between the country's majority Shiite and minority Sunni Muslim communities has raised fears of broader civil conflict.
The Iraqi government is leery of taking that risk, al-Allaq says.
Al-Allaq says so far, the Iraqi government appears to lack the will to make fighting corruption a top priority. As the Oil Ministry's inspector general, it's al-Allaq's job to police an $18 billion industry, but his budget gives him enough money to keep only 10 investigators.
