Category: Iraq

The final welded section of the KRG’s Khurmala – Feyshkabour pipeline lies by trenching immediately south of oil storage tanks at DNO International’s pumping station, 3km from the Turkey border. August 17, 2013. (PATRICK OSGOOD/Iraq Oil Report) Recommend 4 people recommend this. Sign Up to see what your friends recommend. The autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) appears to be appropriating another oil field formerly controlled by Iraq’s federal government – part of a controversial drive to expand control over the country’s disputed territories.The KRG has been lifting crude from the Ain Zalah field, in northwestern Ninewa province, at a rate of roughly 2,000 barrels per day (bpd), according to a worker at the field."They are sending between 100 to 200 trucks to Kurdistan," the worker said. "T…

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Photo Shiite militiamen on Thursday in Tikrit. Thousands of Shiites said they would boycott the fight there against the Islamic State. Credit Khalid Mohammed/Associated Press AL RASHID AIR BASE, Iraq — By Day 2 of the American airstrike campaign against militants holed up in Tikrit, the mission appeared beleaguered on several fronts on Thursday: Thousands of Shiite militiamen boycotted the fight, others threatened to attack any Americans they found, and Iraqi officials said nine of their fighters had been accidentally killed in an airstrike. In Washington, American military leaders insisted that things were going according to plan. They said that they were stepping into the Tikrit fight only after the Iranian- and militia-led advance on the city had stalled after three weeks, and that they welcomed working solely with Iraqi government forces. Gen. Lloyd Austin, the head of the United States Central Command, told a Senate hearing on Thursday […]

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BAGHDAD/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S.-led coalition warplanes launched their first airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Tikrit on Wednesday, officials said, coming off the sidelines to aid Iraqi forces fighting alongside Iran-backed Shi’ite militia on the ground. The decision to give air support to the Tikrit campaign pulls the United States into a messy battle that puts the U.S.-led coalition, however reluctantly, on the same side of a fight as Iranian-backed militia in a bid to support Iraqi forces and opens a new chapter in the war. It also appeared to represent at least a tacit acknowledgement by Baghdad that such airpower was necessary to wrest control of the hometown of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from Islamic State fighters, after its attempts to go it alone stalled. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said Iraqi forces would prevail with the support of "friendly" countries and the international coalition, including arms, […]

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Jassem Abbas spent the past several months sleeping on the floor of a mosque that has become a scabies-infested refugee camp. But he won’t return to his once-comfortable home in Continue Reading

Iraqi Oil Minister Adil Abd al-Mahdi (L) meets with Kurdistan Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani in Erbil on Nov. 13, 2014. (STRINGER/Reuters) Recommend 462 people recommend this. Sign Up to see what your friends recommend. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has received its second federal budget payment for 2015, keeping a fragile oil export and revenue sharing deal on track for now.The region received the 490 billion Iraqi dinar ($408.3 million) payment on Monday, according to the spokesman of the KRG Ministry of Finance, Ahmed Abdulrahman. He said the money would be used to pay overdue salaries of government employees.The payment follows the first transfer made on Feb. 26 of $208.3 million. Both a…

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Photo Shiite and Sunni fighters joined Iraqi forces against ISIS outside former President Saddam Hussein’s palace near Tikrit. Credit Thaier Al-Sudani/Reuters BAGHDAD — As a small force of Islamic State militants holds out in parts of Tikrit for a fourth week, Iraqi forces have been compelled to shift tactics, officials say: Rather than storming in to clear the city at any cost, the security forces are trying to seal off the area and begin preparing for even more challenging battles to the west and north. The Iraqi forces’ progress has put them closer to the doorstep of Nineveh Province, where the city of Mosul looms as the most important battle against the Islamic State. But the hard lessons of the Tikrit offensive, with a heavy cost in casualties for the Shiite militiamen and soldiers involved, have Iraqi officials thinking more cautiously about their next steps. To that end, officials […]

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Russian oil company Gazprom Neft ready for surveys in Kurdish north of Iraq. UPI/Maryam Rahmanian Gazprom Neft said it was surveying the reserve potential in the Kurdish north of Iraq. The Middle East subsidiary of Gazprom Neft said it was ready to survey the reserve potential in the Halabja block of the Kurdish north of Iraq. "The Halabja block has until now undergone very little geological study," Chief Executive Officer Mikhail Kholodov said in a statement. "Conducting seismological surveys is the first step towards identifying the optimal location for an exploration well and these provide a significant amount of new information on the structure of the block." Lukoil, Russia’s largest private oil company, signed a contract revision last year to build two 75-mile long pipelines and associated infrastructure for the West Qurna oil field in southern Iraq. The company this week said it was committed to Iraqi oil developments […]

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The JODI  data just came in with production numbers for January 2015. I really don’t like JODI all that much but they are about two and one half months ahead of the EIA with their world data. And their data is incomplete so I have to substitute the EIA data for the countries that do not report to JODI. So the data I use is about 95% JODI and about 5% EIA. The last data point is January 2015 and is in thousand barrels per day. JODI World We peaked in December at 75,342,000 bpd but dropped 356,000 bpd in January to 74,986 bpd. JODI has the US at 9,226,000 in December but dropping 34,000 bpd in January to 9,192,000 bpd. The US did not start its grand ascent until the summer of  2011 when the shale oil boom exploded. JODI Less USA Without that shale surge in the […]

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WASHINGTON — Every presidential candidate should face pressure to answer, explicitly, these two questions: Given what we now know, was it right or wrong to invade Iraq in 2003 to oust Saddam Hussein and, eight years later, to help topple the regime of Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya? Force the contenders to skip the partisan talking points and make them provide an inkling of a would-be president’s instincts about military interventions. The Iraq invasion was undertaken by the brother of the leading 2016 Republican candidate. The Libya operations were advanced by the Democratic front-runner. Today, both Iraq and Libya are dangerously dysfunctional countries where terrorism is pervasive. At the same time, the threat of the Islamic State has made war-weary Americans, at least temporarily, more receptive to American involvement. Some prospective candidates have no trouble with these questions. Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who is a hard-liner on […]

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