Mosul: the city and province were once among Iraq's crown jewels

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Mosul was once among Iraq’s most important industrial cities and a main source of income.

For more than two years it has been the ISIS stronghold in Iraq and is now at the center of a global coalition to evict the militants from what is Iraq’s second-largest city.

Economic analysts estimate the city’s natural resources to be abundant, rich in sulfur, cement factories, oil, gas and wheat.

 “The ecological structure of Mosul is rich in minerals, some of which are rare in Iraq,” Dr Bewar Khansi, economic advisor at the Kurdistan Security Protection Agency, told Rudaw.

“There is a plant in Nineveh for producing sulfur called the Meshraq Sulfur Plant, with an annual capacity of one million tons of sulfur,” he said. “Nineveh sulfur reserves reach nearly 600 million tons, with an estimated worth of $10 billion.”

Sulfur is a versatile mineral used to produce a variety of things, namely military ammunition.

ISIS has used sulfur as a deadly poison in many of its attacks. Large reserves of sulfur produced at the Meshraq plant fell to ISIS when it took over Mosul in June 2014.  Since then, some of the sulfur stocks have since been destroyed in coalition airstrikes.  

Khansi notes that Mosul is also rich in a variety of valuable rocks that are found in the Nineveh plains, “such as marble, ceramic and carbonate rocks.” He said that the area of the Yezidi town of Shingal has some of the best marble in the region.

Water rich in minerals also counts among the natural wealth of Mosul.  This water is often used for medical treatment by locals and draws tourists to the hub of Hamam Halil.

Mosul is dotted with more than 1,000 factories producing cement or concrete masonry units (CMU). This was used for local construction projects and, before the ISIS takeover, was supplied to other Iraqi provinces as well.

In addition, Mosul is home to one of the country’s biggest sugar plants, fed by sugarcane produced locally in the Nineveh plains.

Nineveh province is also rich in oil and gas.  There are 22 oil and gas wells – mostly in the Kurdish-inhabited areas of the region – some of them currently operational and the rest under exploration, a source from Nineveh’s Oil Body told Rudaw.  

According to the source, there are currently seven oil producing wells in the province, with three of them protected by the Peshmerga: The Batma well has a daily capacity of 1,000 barrels of oil, Ayn Zala can produce 5,000 barrels daily and Sufayeya has a daily capacity of 4,000 barrels.

In the past, some of the oil from these three wells was transported to the Kaske oilfield, and some to Turkey’s Ceyhan Port, through the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline.  

Four other oil wells are located in Qayyara, Najma, Qasab and Bajawan, with a total daily capacity of 20,000 oil barrels per day. The Qayyara fields were recently retaken by the Iraqi army from ISIS.

Iraq’s oil ministry says that the Alan, Ibrahim, Sasan and Atshana oilfields are now also ready to become operational.

There is also a gas well in Shingal that was discovered in 2012, but has not yet been assigned for production.

Qayyara and Kaske are two large refineries in Nineveh province, with a daily refining capacity of 10,000 barrels of oil.  These were the main sources of fuel for ISIS over the two years it occupied the area.

Nineveh was once Iraq’s bread basket as well, with more than half of its nearly 13 million acres of its lands fertile, it accounted for 45 percent of Iraq’s overall wheat supply.

Despite all its wealth, this rich jewel of Iraq has been of little benefit to its people, since the ISIS takeover froze its resources.

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