ASSYAN, Iraq – Jebel Semroot is a dusty heap of rocks plowed and grazed by tough farmers and tougher goats. But this hill surrounding the village of Assyan, where Dallas-based Hunt Oil Co. hopes to drill next year, could have hundreds of millions of barrels of oil trapped beneath it.

Chief executive Ray Hunt flew to Iraq in September to sign an exploration agreement covering Jebel Semroot with Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government.

Trouble is, Jebel Semroot isn't in Kurdish territory. If Hunt Oil drills in these rocks, the company will be helping the Kurds absorb lands in Nineveh province that were historically Kurdish but are still claimed by Iraq's Arab Sunnis.

The deal has already drawn a warning from a group of Sunni clerics who sympathize with insurgents battling U.S. and Iraqi forces.

"Those involved in such contracts will pay the price sooner or later," warned the Association of Muslim Scholars.

While reining in their ambitions just short of independence, the Kurds are making a move to expand their territory, take charge of their oil and insulate themselves in a hostile neighborhood. They are looking to Hunt Oil and other investors to help them get free of the violence and political paralysis of Baghdad. And they want to do it now, before U.S. troops begin leaving Iraq.

Kurdish leaders are pushing before year's end to add the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and other disputed regions like northern Nineveh to the three provinces of the Kurdistan Regional Government.

They lobbied successfully for a U.S. Senate resolution in October that says Iraq's regions should be self-governing, with Baghdad in charge of little more than foreign policy and national security.

They are wooing foreign businesses with tax holidays and other incentives. They have attracted oil companies from France, Norway, Turkey and Canada with exploration deals worth more than $500 million – deals that give the companies' own governments a reason to support Kurdish ambitions.

And they've granted an oil concession to Hunt Oil, a U.S. company close to the White House, in territory that is not officially theirs.

Mr. Hunt said his company does not get involved in the politics of the countries where it operates, but that the Kurdish deal was sound.

"We would not have done this kind of deal if we had not been totally confident about the legality and the KRG's sovereignty," he said.

Kurdish leaders say they realize that independence would fracture Iraq and alarm neighboring countries. If they succeed in their current drive for autonomy, however, they say it could point the way to a "soft partition" of Iraq that would give each of the country's three main ethnic groups (Kurds, Arab Sunnis and Shiites) enough self-determination to live together without civil war.

Baghdad and the Bush administration are not ready to embrace this approach and prefer a stronger central government. State Department officials say the Hunt deal faces legal uncertainties over whether regional or national oil legislation should prevail – even though a national oil law has yet to be enacted.

The officials also say the deal could undermine the Iraqi government and possibly provoke more violence over the loss of oil-rich territories that Arab Sunnis regard as theirs. Another fear among U.S. analysts is that autonomy among Iraq's main ethnic and religious groups would lead to an oil-rich Shiite state in the south that would become a satellite of Iran.

Many, including officials with other oil companies in Iraq, find it hard to believe that President Bush and Ray Hunt did not talk about this deal before it was signed, or that the Kurdistan Regional Government chose to award a concession to the U.S. company without paying much attention to its political connections with the White House.

Mr. Hunt is a longtime supporter of Mr. Bush. He is a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and was instrumental in getting SMU chosen as the site of the George W. Bush presidential library.

Mr. Bush said at a news conference that the Hunt Oil deal in Iraq was a complete surprise. Mr. Hunt said he has not talked about it with Mr. Bush or anyone else in the U.S. government, either before it was signed Sept. 8 or since.

Although Mr. Hunt said he could not discuss the work of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, he said the information used by the company in deciding to explore for oil in Iraq was "100 percent in the public domain."

Ashti Hawrami, Kurdistan's minister of natural resources, said the Hunt company's relationship with the White House was more a liability than an asset because it was sure to attract negative publicity about the deal.

Yet the companies helping the Kurds look for oil will now play an important role in Kurdish foreign policy. They could win the Kurds allies in getting their oil out to world markets. They could also gain protection for the Kurds from neighbors like Turkey angered by Kurdish guerrillas and Kurdish steps toward economic and political independence.

"If people want Iraq to stay united, this is the way to go," said Falah Bashir, director of foreign relations with the Kurdistan Regional Government. "We need an opportunity to open up to the outside world, not to have all the power in Baghdad."

Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani has called the Hunt Oil contract "illegal" and said any oil found in such deals could not be exported. He has championed a dominant role in the development of Iraq's oil reserves for the national oil company, with foreign companies kept on the periphery.

Dr. Hawrami, minister of natural resources with the Kurdistan Regional Government, says Mr. Shahristani should stay out of Kurdistan's business.

"We are the legal ones. We are operating according to our law," Dr. Hawrami said. "For people who are shouting that this is illegal, our advice to them is, 'Shut up.' "

Iraq has more oil than all but two or three other countries in the world. The three provinces that make up the Kurdistan Regional Government, however, have only about 1 percent of the country's proven reserves. If the Kurds can add the super-giant Kirkuk field and other prospective areas like Jebel Semroot, Kurdistan could start to look like Libya, Nigeria or even Russia.

Dr. Hawrami is confident that all three of the ethnic and religious areas of Iraq hold enormous reserves of yet-to-be-discovered oil. In the Kurdish areas of Iraq, he said, "My number is 45 billion" barrels of proven and probable reserves.

Other companies drilling for oil in Kurdish provinces have already found healthy fields. DNO, a Norwegian company, has developed a field called Tawke in far northern Iraq near the borders of Turkey and Syria that Dr. Hawrami estimates could produce 50,000 barrels a day next year.

A larger field called Taq Taq – jointly owned by Genel Enerji of Turkey and Addax Petroleum International of Canada – contains 2 billion barrels of high-quality oil and might produce as much as 330,000 barrels a day by the end of 2008.

The Taq Taq field was initially discovered when Saddam Hussein was in power. As his forces retreated from the region under the U.S. no-fly zone, they seeded the area with "Bouncing Betty" land mines to keep the Kurds from developing it.

The Taq Taq and Tawke fields are both within the three Kurdish provinces that constitute the Kurdish Regional Government.

The 800-square-kilometer Hunt Oil exploration block is another matter.

Mr. Hussein kicked the Kurdish farmers and herders of Assyan off Jebel Semroot in the 1970s and 1980s as part of his Arabization campaign.

When Mr. Hussein's forces retreated to the south, Assyan's former residents moved back. Jebel Semroot was on the Green Line separating Kurdish and Iraqi forces, and parts of the hill are still covered in landmines, Assyan residents say.

Faraji Mahmoud Wahil, 38, a bodyguard for a Kurdish religious leader, lives in a pink adobe compound in Assyan with his immediate family and those of his three brothers – 26 people in all.

"We are not yet attached to the KRG area," Mr. Wahil said. "We belong to Mosul," the capital of Nineveh, which supplies Assyan with fuel, electricity and food rations.

"We hear the vote on whether we stay with Mosul or go with Kurdistan will be next year," Mr. Wahil said. "We hope it's tomorrow. ... I can tell you 99 percent will vote to join the KRG."

It's not the first time the Hunt Oil has faced competing sovereignty claims in the Middle East. The company discovered oil in Yemen in 1985 after signing an exploration contract with the government of Yemen. But then Ray Hunt received a letter from Saudi Arabia claiming that the discovery had been made on land controlled by Saudi Arabia. Hunt Oil ultimately prevailed and the discovery was acknowledged to be in Yemen.

Assyan residents haven't seen any oil seeps or natural gas escaping from Jebel Semroot, but they don't doubt the oil is down there.

"If the government searched for it, they'd find oil under all the lands of Iraq," Mr. Wahil said.

In the late 1970s, the Iraqi national oil company found oil in the far west of the Hunt Oil concession area, said Bewar Khanesi, a geologist who advises the Kurdish regional government and wrote his doctoral thesis on oil in Kurdistan.

"They identified 19 well sites on the Hunt structure. One was drilled, and struck oil. Then with the [1980-1988] war with Iran, they did not come back," he said.

Information about the well – its flow rate, the quality of the oil, the depth of the oil play – is locked away at the Oil Ministry in Baghdad, out of reach, so far, to Kurdish officials, Dr. Khanesi said.

Mr. Hunt said he did not know about the well until after he'd signed the exploration contract.

This earlier discovery could further complicate Hunt Oil's legal situation in Iraq. Mr. Shahristani told a conference of oilmen in September that the Iraqi government intends to give the national oil company exclusive rights in 93 percent of existing oil fields.

Dr. Hawrami, who worked for several years as an oil consultant based in Houston, dismissed any exclusivity for the national oil company as a dream of the federal Oil Ministry based on the way Iraq was governed under Mr. Hussein.

Mr. Hunt said his interest in Iraqi oil dates back nearly 20 years. He said he went to Baghdad on two or three occasions during Mr. Hussein's rule to look into exploration deals there. All of Mr. Hunt's visits to Iraq occurred during the time that Iraq was at war with Iran and when U.S. policy tilted toward Iraq to keep Iran from winning. Mr. Hunt said the discussions abruptly stopped when Mr. Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990.

He said he was impressed with the Iraqi oil people he met on those trips.

In March, Hunt Oil's London representative, Dave McDonald, was urged to look at Kurdistan by a former colleague with ConocoPhillips. Dr. Hawrami came to London to host a conference for oil companies about Kurdish oil soon after, and Mr. McDonald was in the audience.

Company executives in Dallas, meanwhile, were impressed by a CBS News 60 Minutes feature that showed Kurds praising President Bush and trying to rebuild their economy.

In looking at satellite photos of northern Iraq, Mr. McDonald said, Hunt Oil geologists were impressed with Jebel Semroot's potential as a giant oil trap. Things moved quickly after that, and Mr. Hunt says he is now optimistic about the Kurdish region.

"We've been doing business in the Middle East since 1981," he said. "I am convinced the Iraqis will reach the right decisions."

The Kurds have waited years for a new federal oil law. Shiite and Kurdish Iraqi oilmen started negotiations about such legislation back in 2005, with sporadic participation by Arab Sunnis. The negotiators agreed on a draft bill in February but have not been able to come back to that text since then.

Dr. Hawrami sees a power play underway by the federal Oil Ministry, which has tried to monopolize Iraq's oil industry for the Iraqi National Oil Company and exclude foreign oil companies from production-sharing agreements.

As drafts of the agreed compromise legislation changed under the Oil Ministry's influence, the Kurds began writing their own oil legislation, which was approved by the Kurdistan National Assembly in August.

Dr. Hawrami said the Kurdish law recognizes the revenue-sharing arrangement between Kurdistan and Baghdad, which gives 17 percent of national oil revenues to Kurdistan and the rest to Baghdad to be divided as other Iraqi politicians see fit.

By the end of next year, Dr. Hawrami wants Kurdish oil production to hit 400,000 barrels a day. Within five years, he is shooting for production of one million barrels a day.

Getting the oil from Kurdistan to world markets won't be easy. Two pipelines connect the giant Kirkuk field with Turkey's large Ceyhan oil terminal on the Mediterranean Sea. The lines have the capacity to export 1.6 million barrels of oil a day, but hundreds of sabotage attacks by Iraqi insurgents have stopped flows for most of the past four years.

If security improves, politics could intrude. The 600-mile Kirkuk-Ceyhan line is controlled by the Iraqi Oil Ministry, which could punish Kurdistan by blocking its oil exports.

Dr. Hawrami sees no justification for such a move.

"It's all Iraqi oil. I don't see what the fuss is about," he said. "It's not like we would be separately exporting oil."

The oil companies starting to operate in Kurdistan, however, are already debating when and how to build their own export pipeline to Turkey.

For the people of Assyan, the more distance Kurdistan can put between itself and Baghdad, the better off the Kurds will be.

"Even before the Americans came, we believed Iraq was going to be divided between the Kurds, the Shiites and the Sunnis," said Akram Elias, a white-haired Assyan farmer.

"I agree," said Mr. Wahil. "I believe if we can become three parts, then everyone can live in peace."