Attentive Oilprice readers must have read at least a dozen articles describing how hard Iraq has been hit by the drop in oil prices. Iraq’s political travails are by no means over, Baghdad is now the tactical battlefield to have Mustafa al-Kadhimi, the head of the country’s National intelligence service, elected as the new prime minister after the previous two candidates failed to garner sufficient approval in the Parliament. Fighting coronavirus and low oil prices at the same time, the management of Iraq’s slew of problems has befallen to Oil Minister Thamir Ghadhban who has become the de facto head of government after nominal Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi went into self-imposed absence. Against this background, the federal Iraqi government has stopped all payments towards the Kurdistani Regional Government (KRG) last week. To put these numbers in context, the KRG needs around 900 million every month to ensure essential government […]