ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Top Kurdish leaders discussed the takeover of two major oil fields controlled by Baghdad five weeks before they were seized by Kurdish forces, officials told Rudaw.
A Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) official said the closed-door parliament session on June 4 included Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani, Deputy Prime Minister Qubad Talabani, Minister of Natural Resources Ashti Hawrami and an official from Kurdistan Region President Massoud Barzani’s office in addition to MPs.
In the meeting, the leaders discussed securing the massive oil field in Kirkuk and Bai Hassan in Makhmour, Nineveh province, maintaining that the KRG had the right to claim the oil fields and connecting pipelines if Baghdad refused to cooperate with them. The officials said the KRG should try to work with the Iraqi Ministry of Oil but reserved the right to take over the facilities.
Omed Khoshnaw, the head of the KDP’s bloc in the parliament, confirmed that the MPs discussed the possibility of taking control of the fields. He said the prime minister also talked about Khurmala oilfield, which the Peshmerga seized after the Iraqi army pulled out of Kirkuk in mid-June.
“The Peshmerga forces and the KRG will not retreat from that area,” Khoshnaw said.
In a statement on July 11, the KRG said that it “moved to secure the oil fields of Bai Hassan and the Makhmour area, after learning of orders by officials in the federal Ministry of Oil in Baghdad to sabotage the recent mutually-agreed pipeline infrastructure linking the Avana dome with the Khurmala field.”
The move escalated tensions between Iraqi Kurdistan, which has been developing oil deals on its own for years, and Baghdad’s Ministry of Oil, which insists on controlling natural resources. An Oil Ministry spokesman called the takeover unconstitutional and “a threat to national unity.”
A source from the KRG’s Ministry of Natural Resources told Rudaw that the Kirkuk Oil Protection Forces and the Oil Police Force of the Kurdistan Region are controlling the fields, and that “they serve under the KRG and not the KDP,” in reference to Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party, the most powerful in Kurdistan.
“The Iraqi Ministry of Oil was planning to shut down those fields and block the pipeline to increase economic pressure on Kurdistan Region,” the source said.
After the Kurds seized control of the oil fields, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) official website published an article that claimed KDP forces took the fields “without informing the relevant PUK offices.”
However, sources said the parties’ disputes over the oil fields have been resolved.
The KRG said production from the fields will be used for the domestic market, which is facing fuel shortages, and that it will claim its “constitutional share” of the revenue from sales. The region is entitled to 17 percent of Baghdad’s budget but the Iraqi government cut off funds to the KRG in January, straining the region economically.
