Shortly before midnight, an oil tanker set sail from Turkey’s Ceyhan port one day in late May with a historic, $100 million cargo. The tanker, United Leadership, ferried the first major consignment of Kurdish crude into the Mediterranean that night, a million-barrel payload with the potential to shift oil markets and transform the geopolitics of the Middle East. The oil, pumped to Turkey through a newly built pipeline, is part of a gambit by northern Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government, or KRG, to carve out a nation for Iraq’s 6.5 million Kurds, even as Iraq defends its north against the Jihadist Sunni militant group, the Islamic State. Iraq, with U.S. backing, is treating the oil as stolen goods and an attack on its sovereignty. Iraqi authorities have accused the Kurds of treason, and threaten to sue any buyer of crude taken from Iraq without permission. After zigzagging the Mediterranean […]