Najman Yousef, a former Kurdish guerrilla, inspects the scene. This blaze, unlike the attacks roiling the rest of Iraq, is a positive sign: It is burning the excess oil gushing from one of the first wells drilled since the fall of Saddam Hussein four years ago.
Yousef, who once fought off Saddam's Republican Guard in the mountains nearby, has given up his AK-47 assault rifle to work on an oil platform built by Det Norske Oljeselskap, a Norwegian producer and explorer of oil and natural gas known as DNO. Also exploring in the region are oil producers like Western Oil Sands and Heritage Oil, both of Canada; Addax Petroleum of Switzerland: Genel Enerji, a unit of Cukurova Holding in Turkey, and Sterling Energy of Britain.
The Kurds have controlled the area since 1991.
"Before, I was a fighter," said Yousef, who is now 30 and survived Saddam's attempts to annihilate the Kurds. "Now, I'm building Kurdistan, and the oil will help us."
Yousef and the rest of the area's five million Kurds are sitting atop what the Kurdish natural resources minister and Iraqi government estimate to be 25 billion barrels of oil.
That compares to 12.9 billion barrels estimated as Mexico's reserves, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, and the equivalent of more than 80 percent of U.S. reserves.
The Kurdish territory encompasses three provinces - Suleimani, Erbil and Dohuk - that are wedged between Turkey on the north, Syria on the west and Iran on the east.
Freed from Saddam's regime, the Kurds are opening the door to outside investment. They are also weighing the risks of extending their reach into neighboring areas that have large Kurdish populations.
The prime target is the multiethnic Iraqi oil city of Kirkuk, which is 100 kilometers, or 60 miles, from Erbil, the Kurdish capital.
The additional territories would give the Kurds potential reserves of 55 billion barrels, or almost half of Iraq's oil. That includes 10 billion barrels in Kirkuk and 20 billion barrels in other disputed areas. Expansion would set up a confrontation with Turkey, which has its own Kurdish minority and opposes Iraqi Kurds' taking over Kirkuk.
Franklin Lavin, a former U.S. undersecretary of commerce, said, "The Kurds want to make up for the lost time under Saddam." The United States, which invaded Iraq in 2003, is trying to persuade construction and petrochemical companies to use the Kurdish area as a base.
"We want to encourage companies that are looking at Iraq to think about the Kurdish region as a possible gateway into the country," Lavin says.
Douglas Layton, director of the Kurdistan Development Corporation, which promotes the region, says the Kurds aim to create a trading and commercial hub that extends beyond oil.
"Our goal is to be in a position to challenge Dubai," Layton said.
Numerous roadblocks stand in the way of the Kurds' ambitions. In February, after more than a year of negotiations, Iraq's cabinet approved an initial version of a petroleum law that benefited the Kurds because it gave regional governments the right to manage undeveloped fields like the one at Tawke.
The Kurds are the only group so far to take advantage of a provision in Iraq's new Constitution that allows a province to designate itself a region.
In April, Iraq's oil minister, Hussain Shahristani, a Shiite, introduced amendments to the draft that allocated management of 93 percent of the country's oil reserves to the Iraq National Oil Company. The Kurds say they ended up with fields that were commercially unattractive to develop.
The Kurds countered. Under their plan, 58 percent of Iraq's reserves would be run by the national oil company and the rest would fall to the Kurdistan Regional Government and other local bodies.
Kurdish members of the Iraqi Parliament, who make up about a quarter of that body, will reject the draft law as it stands, says a Kurdistan Regional Government spokesman, Khaled Salih.
As Iraq's factions jostle for influence in the new national government, Shahristani has warned the Kurds not to sign oil agreements with foreign companies. In March, he said that the agreement with DNO might not be valid because it has not been approved by the central government.
"All the contracts that have been signed either by the previous regime or by the northern region will have to satisfy the conditions of the new law," Shahristani said in Vienna at a meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Rochdi Younsi, an analyst with Eurasia Group, a New York firm that advises on political risks, says big companies worry that if they enter the Kurdish region before a petroleum law is ratified, they will hurt their chances of working in the rest of Iraq.
"Major oil companies don't want to damage their relationship with Baghdad," Younsi said.
For now, that leaves Iraqi Kurdistan to wildcatters like DNO. The Norwegian company reached two production-sharing agreements with the Kurdistan Regional Government in 2004, gaining a 55 percent stake in the two licenses. DNO will take 10 to 30 percent of the profits; the rest will go to the regional government.
Magne Normann, head of DNO's Iraq unit, hired the Great Wall Drilling Company, a unit of China National Petroleum, to drill for the oil. DNO has 80 trucks standing by at the field to begin shipments to local markets and is waiting for the national government in Baghdad to issue an export license to use an Iraqi-owned pipeline to Turkey.
"We signed our agreements before the interim government was in place in 2004," Normann said. "We took all the political risk. There should be compensation for that."
DNO is taking physical risks, too, since getting to Tawke from Erbil is a logistical challenge. Normann and his team of Kurdish and French engineers left the capital in a convoy of three sport utility vehicles at 4:30 a.m. on a March morning, and before they left, they were briefed by a security adviser, who gave only his first name, Graham.
"If your team leader is killed, follow your driver," said Graham, referring to the person who is in charge in each vehicle. "If you're fired upon, just drive. Do not stop."
After five hours navigating bone-rattling dirt roads, the convoy reached Tawke. Apart from a satellite television dish, the mud houses appear not to have changed in 100 years. There's one sign of incipient wealth: on a hilltop, streams of black, gooey crude oil cut through the green grass.
"The oil seepages were a hint that there could be commercial oil here," Normann said.
Later, at the site of the well fire, Normann almost skipped with joy. After drilling, companies typically open up the well to see how fast oil is coming out. In most cases, there are no storage facilities during such tests, so drillers simply burn the oil. The blaze's intensity can be an indication of the oil pressure in a well.
At first, DNO estimated that the Tawke field held 100 million barrels and would reach peak production of 50,000 barrels a day next year, he said. Now, it appears that it may contain much more. The well that is burning, DNO's fifth in Tawke, has a flow rate of 12,000 barrels a day, 40 percent greater than a previous well in the same area.
"A couple of more wells like this one and we'll meet our target for this year," Normann said.