DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Sept. 4 (UPI) -- A former Iraqi oil minister says political parties will resolve the sometimes violent power struggle in Basra as British troops pull back to the airport.

“There’s a struggle for power everywhere,” Ibrahim Bahrul-Uloom said on the sidelines of an Iraqi oil conference.

“Basra’s very important, the richest city in the world as far as the reserves are concerned because Basra, only as a province, has 68 billion barrels of oil,” he said. “But I think whatever we have seen right now from tension between the political side can be solved within the next few months.”

Bahrul-Uloom, oil minister from September 2003 to June 2004 and May 2005 to December 2005, spoke at the Iraq Oil, Gas, Petrochemical and Electricity Summit, organized by the London-based Iraq Development Program.

Basra is the oil capital of Iraq, where most of the country’s 115 billion barrels of proven reserves are located and nearly all its 1.7 million barrels per day of exports are sent to market.