BAGHDAD: By 12.30pm, the queue stretches over the Tigris river. It loops past one of Uday Hussein’s palaces, and on to the gates of Baghdad’s main oil refinery. At the front of the queue to Freedom Square petrol station, guards armed with guns and clubs try to keep order.

“I’m fed up,” Saad Abdul Aziz says as he inches his car into the forecourt. “I’ve been waiting since 6am. All I want to do is visit my relatives in Mosul.”

Eight months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and America’s occupation, Iraq is in the grip of an unlikely crisis. There is not enough petrol — in a country with the world’s second largest oil reserves.

Last Friday, Iraq’s US-appointed governing council introduced rationing, restricting drivers to 30 litres — about half a tank. Under the new system, drivers with odd-number licence plates can get petrol on a Friday; even-number cars have to wait until Saturday.

It was Saddam Hussein who last used the alternate system back in 1981, during the dark days of the Iran-Iraq war. “This is madness,” Hassan Yusef, a taxi driver, said on Monday as he joined the kilometre-long queue in the Daura suburb of Baghdad. “There is enough oil here for every Iraqi to have his own tap.”

How long would he have to wait? “About seven hours,” he said. “At first we were angry. Now we’ve got used to it. I now spend one day working, followed by one day sitting in the queue. If you need to go to the loo, you have to get another driver to move your car, otherwise you lose your place.”

The US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) — immune from the petrol crisis in its vast HQ in one of Saddam’s riverside palaces — has given different explanations for the situation. Dave Senor, the spokesman for Paul Bremer, the US’s proconsul in Iraq, recently blamed the problem on “seasonal hoarding”. Others point out that some Iraqis queue for petrol sold at the official price of about 3p a gallon, and resell it on the black market for more than pounds 1 a gallon. There are more cars: 250,000 new vehicles have flooded Iraq since US administrators abolished all tariff restrictions.

At Baghdad’s oil ministry, officials say the shortage is due to sabotage. Since the end of the Saddam era, there have been at least 85 attacks on pipelines. A spokesman, Asim Jehad, said that the new rationing system was temporary but would continue until security improved — in other words, for some time.—dpa