His face blackened and helmet coated in soot, Hussein Saleh watched the oil fields of his home town in northern Iraq burn, belching up thick smoke that blotted out the sun. Dozens of fellow workers and engineers from Iraq’s North Oil Company, wearing dirty jackets and overalls with scarves wrapped around their faces, started up their water tankers and bulldozers for the day’s work. Their job: to extinguish and cap another oil well that Islamic State militants set ablaze when U.S.-backed Iraqi forces drove them out of Qayyara in August. “I’ve worked in oil for 30 years and I’ve never seen anything like this,” 57-year-old Saleh said, standing close enough to the flames to feel the heat. “Daesh (Islamic State) just put explosives on the wellheads and blew them up,” he said. The men work in large teams to reduce the blaze, contain the fire and then cap […]