Category: Iraq

Amman (Platts)–6Jan2015/501 am EST/1001 GMT Iraq’s crude oil exports reached 2.94 million b/d in December, a new record high, taking the country’s 2014 monthly average to 2.517 million b/d, as the recent deal with Kurdish authorities begins to bear fruit. The exports include 2.76 million b/d from southern Persian Gulf terminals, along with 180,000 b/d shipped from the Turkish port of Ceyhan, well-informed Iraqi oil sources confirmed to Platts Monday, January 5. Based on these figures, Iraq’s production during December is estimated at 3.4 million b/d, including 150,000 b/d of Kurdish crude. If confirmed, this would be the country’s highest production rate since 1979. November production was 2.89 million b/d, while exports were 2.51 million b/d, according to the official figures. Northern exports were up 152,000 b/d from November, while southern exports rose 278,000 b/d from 2.482 million b/d in November. Oil previously exported through an independent pipeline system […]

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‘ISIL is losing’: Iraqis optimistic for 2015 thumbnail Iraqi security forces backed by Shia militias, Kurdish forces and Sunni Muslim tribesmen will drive the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) from all Iraqi lands before the end of 2015, Iraqi security officials and analysts say. Iraq has been witnessing its worst security crisis since the 2003 US-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein. In June, ISIL fighters overran Iraq’s second largest city of Mosul without any real resistance from Iraqi troops. A few days later, ISIL seized the neighbouring province of Salahaddin and swaths of Kirkuk and Anbar provinces. Thousands of civilians and troops have been killed since then in direct clashes or mass executions carried out by ISIL. About two million people have been displaced from the conflict zones. The dramatic collapse of Iraqi troops in the northern and western provinces and the rapid advance of ISIL […]

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BAGHDAD (AP) — Gunmen killed three Sunni clerics near the mostly Shiite city of Basra in southern Iraq, a government spokesman said Friday, an apparent sectarian attack that drew immediate calls for calm. Interior Ministry spokesman Saad Maan told The Associated Press that the assailants ambushed a car Thursday night carrying the clerics in the mostly Sunni district of Bab al-Zubeir near Basra, shooting dead the three and seriously wounding two other clerics traveling with them. The ministry, he said, was investigating the killings. He gave no other details. There was no claim of responsibility for the ambush and no reports of retaliatory attacks by Sunnis. Iraq’s sectarian violence peaked in 2006-07, when thousands of Shiites and Sunnis perished in attacks. The violence later eased but has partially resumed after Sunni militants of the Islamic State group swept across much of northern and western Iraq last year. Shiites make […]

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Iraqi PM Haider al-Abadi (center) leads the Dec. 16, 2014, Iraqi Council of Ministers meeting. (Source: Iraqi Cabinet media office) Iraq Oil Report Recommend 5 people recommend this. Sign Up to see what your friends recommend. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s Cabinet is trying to pull off a difficult balancing act – attempting to fund a war, reconstruct a country, and corral a fractured body politic, despite a devastating collapse in oil revenues.The 2015 budget bill is now with Parliament, which gave it a first reading on Dec. 25 and will hold a session on it next week, though a final vote is unlikely until later in January.The draft, obtained by Iraq Oil Report, makes several attempts to remedy past budg…

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Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi (left) with Basra Gov. Majid al-Nasrawi (center) having tea on the street in Basra city on Dec. 29, 2014. Abadi is attempting to slow down the Basra campaign to create an autonomous region. (Source: Iraqi Prime Minister’s Media Office) Leaders in Basra are making a renewed push to form a region akin to the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) – a move that would reduce the central government’s power over the engine of Iraq’s economy.The campaign comes as Basrawis grow increasingly impatient with Baghdad, which has delayed implementing revenue sharing provisions for Basra while simultaneously making budget concessions to the KRG. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is taking the threat seriously enough that he met wi…

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Russian oil company Gazprom Neft said third oil well now in service in Badra field in Iraq. (Photo: Gazprom Neft) Gazprom Neft said a third well now in service at the Badra oil field in Iraq ensures a production level of at least 15,000 barrels per day. The Russian company said it brought its third well into production under the terms of a contract concluded previously with its Chinese counterparts at Zhongman Petroleum and Natural Gas Group. The company, the oil arm of Russian gas company Gazprom, brought Badra online in late 2013 and testing of new pipeline infrastructure to the export terminal at Basra began in May. The Russian company said the terms of its Iraqi contract call for the eventual production of 170,000 bpd. The Russian company said investors in November reached agreements with the Iraqi government that reinforces a share of production from the Badra oil […]

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Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi (left) with Basra Gov. Majid al-Nasrawi (center) having tea on the street in Basra city on Dec. 29, 2014. Abadi is attempting to slow down the Basra campaign to create an autonomous region. (Source: Iraqi Prime Minister’s Media Office) Leaders in Basra are making a renewed push to form a region akin to the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) – a move that would reduce the central government’s power over the engine of Iraq’s economy.The campaign comes as Basrawis grow increasingly impatient with Baghdad, which has delayed implementing revenue sharing provisions for Basra while simultaneously making budget concessions to the KRG. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is taking the threat seriously enough that he met wi…

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BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Behind black gates and high walls, Iraqi national security agents watch 200 women and children. Boys and girls play in the yard and then dart inside their trailers, located in a former U.S. military camp and onetime headquarters for Saddam Hussein’s officials in Babel province’s capital Hilla. The women and children are unwilling guests, rounded up as they fled with their male relatives in October from Jurf al-Sakhr, a bastion of Islamic State, during a Shi’ite militia and military operation to clear the farming community. Once they were arrested, security forces separated out the men, accusing them of being Islamic State fighters. They have not been heard from since. Security forces say the women and children are being investigated, but have not been brought to court. Their status shows how central Iraq’s mixed Shi’ite and Sunni regions are being altered. As Shi’ite forces push into territories […]

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Iraqi refugees prepare for winter More than 1.3 million Iraqis have been displaced this year into a region crushed under the weight of the Syrian refugee crisis. View Photos IRBIL, Iraq — For three years, he worked closely with U.S. forces in Iraq. Now Ammar Younes sits in his frigid tent in a camp in Iraq’s Kurdish region, using a scalpel to gouge pieces of shrapnel out of his mangled legs as his young children look on. A trainer in the Iraqi army, the 34-year-old was wounded when Islamic State extremists placed a bomb under his car in Mosul in June, just a week before the northern city fell to the militants . He was forced to flee his hospital bed, still wearing his medical gown, when the city was overrun. Younes is one of more than 2 million Iraqis uprooted this year by the advance of the Islamic […]

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