Iraq’s semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan has been assured by the buyers of its crude oil that the oil was not headed to the U.S., Kurdistan’s Minister of Natural Resources Ashti Hawrami told Reuters on Thursday, just days after the central Iraqi government said it would challenge the legal validity of Kurdish oil exports to the US in American courts in a renewed tension between Baghdad and Erbil over crude oil exports. “I have made inquiries with our crude buyers and was assured that no cargo with crude is going to the United States, ” Hawrami told Reuters, as the Kurds are trying to avoid tensions with the central government. “Oil could be stored or travelling to other places, but not the U.S., ” Hawrami told Reuters. Earlier this week, reports suggested that Kurdish oil was headed for the United States, further buttressing the semiautonomous region’s economic independence as Erbil […]