Category: Iraq

Members of Iraq’s anti-terrorism unit for oil facility protection take their positions during a training exercise in Basra on Nov. 18, 2012. (ATEF HASSAN/Reuters) Recommend 171 people recommend this. Sign Up to see what your friends recommend. Security forces in southern Iraq are struggling to contain a spate of recent tribal conflicts that have left citizens dead and injured, disrupted transportation routes, and damaged energy infrastructure.Three battles this week – two in Basra province and one in Missan – have highlighted the limited capacity of government security forces, which have been stretched thin because many of the most capable units have redeployed to fight the so-called Islamic State (IS) militant group in other …

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At least three people were killed by a truck bomb Wednesday in Basra province – an area that has recently been relatively insulated from such attacks.The explosives-laden truck blew up in a parking lot on the main freeway linking Umm Qasr port with the town of Safwan, about 20 kilometers south of Basra city, on the border with Kuwait."Most of the victims were truckers heading to Umm Qasr’s commercial port," said Talib Alhusona, the mayor of Zubair.Various officials gave different c…

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WASHINGTON — Iran has deployed advanced rockets and missiles to Iraq to help fight the Islamic State in Tikrit, a significant escalation of firepower and another sign of Iran’s growing influence in Iraq. United States intelligence agencies detected the deployments in the past few weeks as Iraq was marshaling a force of 30,000 troops — two-thirds of them Shiite militias largely trained and equipped by Iran, according to three American officials. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence reports on Iran. Iran has not yet launched any of the weapons, but American officials fear the rockets and missiles could further inflame sectarian tensions and cause civilian casualties because they are not precision guided. Their deployment is another dilemma for the Obama administration as it trains and equips the Iraqi military and security services to help defeat the Islamic State, but unlike Iran is unwilling to […]

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ENLARGE A Shiite soldier fighting against Islamic State militants tried to plant a flag near Tikrit this week. Photo: Reuters BAGHDAD—Ezaz Al Jobouri returned this week to his Sunni hometown near the battleground of Tikrit to find a house with neither electricity nor water, and a swarm of Shiite militiamen, long violent adversaries of his sect, patrolling the streets. After two months away, Mr. Jobouri didn’t mind. “I don’t care who liberated my town as long as it is safe and the families are back home,” Mr. Jobouri said Friday, speaking by phone from the farming community of Al Alam northeast of Tikrit. “We can live with the current situation as long as there is no Daesh anymore,” he added, using the Arabic acronym of Islamic State, the Sunni militant group that controlled the town until this week. Shiite militiamen and Iraqi government forces freed the town in some […]

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KRG Minister of Natural Resources Ashti Hawrami during a speech at the 2015 Sulaimani Forum on March 11, 2015, as Iraqi Oil Minister Adil Abd al-Mahdi looks on. (Source: American University of Iraq – Sulaimani) The fragile oil export and revenue sharing deal between Baghdad and Erbil appears to be in renewed danger of collapsing after KRG Minister of Natural Resources Ashti Hawrami publicly accused his federal counterpart of reneging on their agreement.“Why should we only have received $208 million when we are owed $3.6 billion?” Hawrami said.Hawrami aired his grievances Wednesday during a panel discussion at a conference in Sulaimaniya, sitting next to federal Oil Minister Adil Abd al-Mah…

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Oryx Petroleum cuts spending for Kurdish oil operations, but expects production to hold steady. UPI/Ayad Rasheed The bulk of spending for 2015 will target oil operations in northern Iraq and, while spending is reduced, output should be static, Oryx Petroleum announced. Oryx, a Canadian company focused on operations in the Kurdish north of Iraq, said it was planning 2015 capital spending of $140 million, a 60 percent reduction from the budget set in November. Oryx Chief Executive Officer Michael Ebsary said low oil prices and "disruptions to market access" in the semiautonomous region led in part to the spending revision . "Accordingly, we have moderated our capital expenditure plans to focus on our core development assets to enable us to achieve our targeted near term production growth," he said in a statement. "We are also reducing costs throughout the organization in order to increase our overall efficiency." The company […]

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BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Oil companies have proposed millions of dollars of cuts in development spending in Iraq, a senior oil ministry official said, after Baghdad told them low oil prices and its fight against Islamic State had made payments difficult. In a series of letters sent to companies such as Royal Dutch Shell, BP and Exxon Mobil since January, seen by Reuters, the oil ministry set out the need for change in response to "the rapid drastic decrease in crude oil prices". The slump in crude prices to below $60 a barrel from $115 in June has slashed government revenues in Iraq, OPEC’s second biggest exporter, just as it faces economic crisis triggered by Islamic State’s seizure of north and western provinces and surging expenditure to fund a military counter-offensive. In view of the fact that a significant proportion of development costs are passed on to Iraq, the oil […]

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LONDON (Reuters) – Iraq is building up debts to the oil companies developing its giant fields, industry sources said, a further sign of how the oil-price drop is putting a squeeze on revenues in OPEC’s second-largest producer. Western oil companies including Royal Dutch Shell, BP and Exxon Mobil are working at Iraq’s southern oilfields under service contracts, which are currently based on a fixed dollar fee for additional volumes produced. As a result of the halving of oil prices to around $56 a barrel from $115 in June, the amount of crude needed to pay the companies has roughly doubled – reducing revenue to a government fighting an Islamic State insurgency. "The Iraqis have a problem. The number of barrels they have to give to the companies as service fees has risen two-fold because the oil price has fallen two-fold. So Iraq simply has less barrels for themselves," said […]

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The budgetary blow from falling oil prices is being acutely felt in crude revenues-dependent Iraq, which is undermining the government’s efforts to pay for a war against Islamic State extremists. Senior writer for global energy issues Bill Spindle joined  the Moneybeat show to discuss his page one story and explain how this funding shortfall means that Iraq’s government is increasingly having to rely on Iran-backed militias in the fight against the extremists. “The problem is that these militias are really very sectarian, they are entirely made up of Shiites, but when they move into areas like they are doing now…those are all Sunni-dominated areas. And as they move into them you get all sorts of tensions that result from all of this and it’s all just being exacerbated by the lack of money now.”

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Smoke billows during clashes between Iraqi army forces, supported by Shiite militias, against IS militants near Tikrit on March 9, 2015. (ALI MOHAMMED/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) Pro-government forces have regained control of the Ajil and Hamrin oil fields, but militants from the so-called Islamic State (IS) group set fire to more than a dozen wells as they retreated. "The blowout of the wells took place sequentially," said a senior official from the state-run North Oil Company (NOC), which officially operates the fields. "IS bombed 11 oil wells at Hamrin, another seven wells at Ajil. All are burning."Before the fields were seized by IS militants in June 2014, Aj…

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