ISTANBUL, Turkey, July 2 (UPI) -- Saddam Hussein's oil deals and those the Kurds have reached with oil companies will be kept but modified to comply with a new Iraqi oil law.

"All of them will be reviewed," said Thamir Ghadhban, energy adviser to Iraq's prime minister. "They will not be canceled. They will not be asked to bid again. They are a special case." All other fields will be put to tender, he said.

Iraq and China are in talks to bring a 1997 deal in line with a yet-to-be approved oil law which, as currently written, forms a federal oil and gas council to review the new deals. The oil law is stuck in negotiations between the federal government and Kurdistan Regional Government over control of certain fields and Ghadhban, leading Baghdad in negotiations with the Kurds, said it is unknown, maybe a couple months, before progress is made.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani last week led a 40-plus member delegation to China. It included Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani.

"China is very important to us because we know that they have rising demand for oil and southeast Asia is very important to Iraq as a market, now and for the future," Ghadhban told reporters in Istanbul, Turkey, following a presentation at the "East Meets West: New Frontiers for Energy Security" conference, organized by Cambridge Energy Research Associates.