WASHINGTON DC (Kurdistan 24) \u2013 Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Iraq and Iran, Andrew Peek, explained on Wednesday that the US was strongly urging the Iraqi government to resume the export of oil from Kirkuk to Turkey.<\/p>\n
Those exports were cut off last year after Iraqi forces, in a military operation engineered by Qasim Soleimani, head of the Quds Forces of Iran\u2019s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, attacked Kurdish forces in Kirkuk, seizing the city and its nearby oil fields.<\/p>\n
The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) had been exporting 300,000 barrels of oil per day, north to Turkey, through the Ceyhan pipeline. After the assault on Kirkuk, Baghdad ended those exports and began trucking a fraction of that oil (30,000 barrels per day) to Iran.<\/p>\n
Last week, Iraq stopped even those limited exports, just before the renewed US sanctions on Iran began.<\/p>\n
Thus, as Peek affirmed, it \u201cjust makes sense\u201d for Iraq to export the Kirkuk oil to Turkey. \u201cIt\u2019s good for Baghdad;\u00a0it\u2019s good for Erbil.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is something we\u2019re committed to,\u201d Peek added, explaining that the issue had been a major topic of discussion, \u201camong two or three others,\u201d when Deputy Secretary of State, John Sullivan, visited Baghdad and Erbil some four weeks ago.<\/p>\n
Peek was a member of that delegation, and he will be returning to the region next week, he told an audience at The Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington DC.<\/p>\n
When Sullivan last visited Baghdad and Erbil, then-Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi\u00a0concluded<\/a>\u00a0an understanding with the KRG to resume the export of Kirkuk oil to Turkey, through the pipeline which passes through the Kurdistan Region.<\/p>\n However, it was left to the incoming Prime Minister, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, who took office October 25, and Iraq\u2019s Oil Minister, to give final approval to the agreement.<\/p>\n Finishing that business will, presumably, be a major objective of Peek\u2019s forthcoming visit, although he declined to predict success, describing himself as pessimistic by nature.<\/p>\n Answering a question from Kurdistan 24, Peek stressed the importance of \u201cgood cooperation\u201d between the Peshmerga and the Iraqi Security Forces, affirming that we will use \u201cour offices to help ensure that the coordination\u201d between the two \u201cis very, very tight.\u201d<\/p>\n Peek also provided further clarification of the waiver that Iraq has received on Iranian sanctions.<\/p>\n It is for 45 days only, and it is for \u201celectricity payments, because of the conditions in Iraq\u2019s south, in Basra,\u201d Peek said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe reality right now is that Iraq has to import some electricity and gas from Iran to meet\u201d its needs for \u201cdomestic power generation\u2014about 1200 megawatts\u2014which it can\u2019t produce on its own.\u201d<\/p>\n The waiver, Peek continued, is based \u201con the condition that Iraq demonstrate a pathway to energy independence.\u201d No details, however, have emerged, at least publicly, as to how Iraq plans to achieve that goal.<\/p>\n Although Peek emphasized the advantages to both Baghdad and Erbil in resuming the export of Kirkuk oil to Turkey, and how it would obviously help to reduce Turkey\u2019s imports of Iranian oil.<\/p>\n Turkey was one of eight countries granted a six-month waiver to import Iranian oil. Nonetheless, on Tuesday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan strongly criticized the sanctions, denouncing them as \u201csteps aimed at unbalancing the world.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t want to live in an imperialist world,\u201d Erdogan said. \u201cWe will absolutely not abide by such sanctions.\u201d The following day, when US President Donald Trump was asked to respond to Erdogan\u2019s remarks, he declined to do so.<\/p>\n Presumably, this issue will be among the subjects discussed, when Trump and Erdogan meet this weekend in Paris, where they will both be attending ceremonies to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I.<\/p>\n Peek also noted some early successes for the new US sanctions. As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said, the US has already managed to cut Iran\u2019s oil exports by one million barrels a day.<\/p>\n \u201cWe see that it is increasingly hard for Iran to pay its proxies\u201d in the region, Peek stated, as it doesn\u2019t have access to the same amount of hard currency it enjoyed earlier.<\/p>\n \u201cThat translates into how well, at least in the medium run, it can project power,\u201d he explained. After all, \u201cpeople need to get paid.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n SOURCE<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" WASHINGTON DC (Kurdistan 24) \u2013 Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Iraq and Iran, Andrew Peek, explained on Wednesday that the US was strongly urging the Iraqi government to resume the export of oil from Kirkuk to Turkey. Those exports were cut off last year after Iraqi forces, in a military operation engineered by Qasim Soleimani, head of the Quds… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[63,182,180,20,181,61,40,59],"class_list":["post-2410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article","tag-baghdad","tag-erbil","tag-export","tag-iraq","tag-kirkuk","tag-kurdistan","tag-oil","tag-turkey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2410"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2411,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2410\/revisions\/2411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}