Turkey’s Optimistic Plans in Iraq seem to be Faltering

According to a Nov. 28 news report by the state-run Anatolian Agency, the Iraqi Oil Ministry decided to build a new pipeline that enters Turkey from Fish Khabur to replace a heavily damaged line. The 350-kilometer (217-mile) pipeline would have a daily capacity target of 1 million barrels and would start in Iraq's Salahuddin province, pass through Kirkuk and Mosul and reach Turkey at Fish Khabur. The existing line had become unusable during the IS occupation of Mosul.

However, Iran helped Iraq in its fight against the Kurds, and Iraqi Oil Minister Jabar al-Luaibi announced that Baghdad had signed an agreement to move Kirkuk oil through Iran. The deal calls for pumping 30,000-60,000 barrels daily through a proposed pipeline to the Iranian oil refinery at Kermanshah. Until that pipeline is completed, oil will be transported by tankers. Luaibi said in a Jan. 7 statement that transports will begin before the end of January with an initial capacity of 30,000 barrels a day.

There are five major oil fields in Kirkuk. The KRG was shipping daily to Turkey 300,000 barrels of oil it gets from the Havana and Bay Hassan fields through an alternative pipeline. Northern Oil Co., working for the Iraqi government, was pumping 150,000 barrels a day from wells in the three other fields. Luaibi recently said that, thanks to investments of foreign oil companies, they would increase the daily capacity at Kirkuk to 1 million barrels.

But although three months have passed, there has been no concrete development apart from news reports about the new pipeline.

The proposed border crossing at Ovakoy and the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline project are linked. Either the Baghdad government forces will assume control of the route to the Turkish border or there will be a deal with the KRG. Today, though Mosul and Tal Afar are under the control of the central government, the route to Fish Khabur in the north is controlled by the Kurdish peshmerga. Government forces, after their initial advances, halted at the boundary of the disputed zone. Turkey, however, was hoping that the Iraqi army would ignore the boundary and assume control of the corridor as far as Fish Khabur.