Dec 7 (Reuters) - Iraq on Dec. 11-12 will hold its second auction since the 2003 U.S. invasion of oilfield service contracts, ramping up its efforts to lure foreign oil companies back into the country after a long absence.

Here is a history of oil operations in Iraq:

-- In 1914 British and German companies negotiated joint participation in the newly-founded Turkish Petroleum Company that held prospecting rights in Mesopotamia.

-- The San Remo Agreement of 1920 gave Britain political control over all Mesopotamia, in return for France taking over the German share in the Turkish Petroleum Company.

-- France was not satisfied with its secondary role in world oil, and it set up the Compagnie Francaise des Petroles in 1924 to take up the French stake in Mesopotamia, now a British colony renamed Iraq.

-- In Oct. 1927, an exploration team of the Turkish Petroleum Company hit a gusher, proving oil reserves in large quantities near Kirkuk in northern Iraq. The Turkish Petroleum Company was renamed the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) in 1929. Finds at Mosul and Basra followed, and several new fields were discovered and put into production in the 1940s and 1950s.

-- In July 1928, Britain, the United States, France and the Netherlands effectively agreed to share out Iraq’s oil with the so-called “Red Lines Agreement”. Royal Dutch/Shell, Anglo-Persian, CFP, Exxon, Mobil, Atlantic Richfield, Gulf Oil Corporation, Standard Oil of Indiana (Amoco), and Participations and Explorations Corp., established a joint venture -- the Near East Development Company -- to jointly develop fields in many other Middle East countries falling within the red line marked on the map by the negotiators.

-- The Red Line Agreement was scrapped in the grand Hotel Aviz in Lisbon, Portugal, in Nov. 1948.

-- In April 1932, a British-dominated international consortium, British Oil Development Company (BODC), obtained a 75-year oil concession for territory lying west of the Tigris and north of the 33rd parallel. The consortium was intended to be a competitor to IPC in Iraq. Ten years later, before it would start production, BODC was bought out by Mosul Petroleum Company (MPC), a fully owned subsidiary of IPC.

-- In Dec. 1938, Basra Petroleum Company (BPC), another subsidiary of IPC, obtained a 75-year concession for the rest of Iraq. Thus all of Iraq, with the exception of the “transferred territory,” came under IPC’s control. Competition was eliminated.

-- The IPC was nationalized in 1972, as were all foreign-owned oil companies by 1975, and all facets of Iraq’s oil industry were thereafter controlled by the government through the Iraq National Oil Company and its subsidiaries.

-- Desperate to boost revenues and oil sales after years of war, Saddam Hussein tried in the 1990s to strike deals with oil companies from China, Russia and elsewhere to develop some of Iraq’s fields. The deals were not finalised, partly due to international sanctions. Sources:Reuters/www.globalpolicy.org/www.britannica.com (Writing by Carl Bagh and Jijo Jacob, Bangalore Editorial Reference Unit; Editing and additional writing by David Cutler)