Shafaq News

On March 3, 2026, Iraq’s southern oilfields began
going dark. The trigger was the closure of the Strait of Hormuz —the narrow
waterway through which roughly a fifth of global oil trade moves— but the
deeper cause had nothing to do with the strait. Baghdad had spent decades
building an oil economy with a single export corridor, no tanker fleet of its
own, and no storage buffer capable of absorbing even a brief disruption. When
the corridor closed, there was nothing else. What followed was a crisis that Iraq
had, in every meaningful sense, already chosen.

Iraq exports approximately 93% of its crude through
terminals at Basra on the Persian Gulf. With those terminals effectively
severed from international markets, onshore storage reached capacity within
days, forcing authorities to shut in fields across the south. National
output fell from roughly 4.3 million barrels per day (bpd) in February to below 1.3
million bpd the following month, and production from the main southern
oilfields specifically collapsed by around 80%, to approximately 800,000 bpd.
The mechanism required no complexity: when export throughput stops, storage
fills, and fields shut. The architecture of dependency did the rest.

The Fiscal Trap

Iraq holds 145 billion barrels of proved crude
reserves —17% of the Middle East total and 8% of the global figure. It is
OPEC’s second-largest producer after Saudi Arabia. That endowment, however, has
not produced fiscal resilience. Petroleum revenues account for more than 90% of
total government income, and the International Monetary Fund has calculated a
budget break-even price of $84 per barrel, up from $54 in 2020. The margin has
narrowed precisely as the strategic vulnerabilities have deepened.

Oil expert Asim Jihad has put a direct figure on what
the production collapse means in revenue terms: monthly oil income, which stood
at roughly $7 billion before the crisis, could fall below $1 billion if export
disruptions persist —a decline of roughly 90%. For a state with no comparable
revenue source, that is a fiscal emergency with no short-term exit.

The Fleet That Was Never Rebuilt

The most immediate operational exposure is the absence
of a national tanker fleet. Iraq depends entirely on chartered vessels, meaning
that when the strait becomes hostile, shipments halt —not by political decision
but by commercial calculation. Although Iran offered assurances that Iraqi
crude could transit safely, Jihad explained that shipping companies and
insurers operate on actual risk assessments rather than declared political
positions. Without its own fleet, Iraq has no mechanism to act on any assurance,
however sincere.

This is a self-inflicted condition with a clear
historical origin. In the late 1970s, Iraq operated 26 large tankers with
capacities reaching 250,000 to 300,000 tons —the strongest oil transport fleet
among Arab states, exporting crude directly to Europe and Asia. The Iran-Iraq
War of the 1980s destroyed most of that capacity. What followed was not
reconstruction but permanent delegation: Iraq transferred shipping
responsibility to buyers through FOB (free on board) contracts managed by SOMO,
the State Oil Marketing Organization, and never returned to the question of
fleet ownership.

Jihad clarified that the debate over rebuilding a
national fleet “turned into a justification for deferring the decision rather
than resolving it within a clear strategic vision.” Political instability and
ministerial turnover allowed the deferral to harden into policy by default. The
result, in his assessment, was that “limited financial allocations to the
maritime transport sector contributed to delaying fleet construction, leading
to near-total reliance on global shipping companies and reducing Iraq’s flexibility
in managing its oil exports.”

One Corridor, No Alternative

Only Saudi Arabia and the UAE possess operational
crude pipelines capable of routing significant volumes around the strait. A
pipeline from Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq oil field to the Red Sea port of Yanbu
allows Riyadh to redirect roughly one-fifth of its daily exports. The UAE’s
Habshan-Fujairah pipeline can divert approximately half of its output to the
Gulf of Oman. Both countries built those bypasses because they calculated that
strategic redundancy was worth the capital cost. Iraq never made that calculation
—or more precisely, made it repeatedly and came up empty, which is functionally
the same outcome.

Oil expert Dhurgham Mohammed Ali told Shafaq News that
the Strait of Hormuz is the critical chokepoint through which more than 90% of
Iraq’s oil exports pass, along with the majority of its imports from Asia,
meaning any disruption hits the Iraqi economy immediately and without buffer.
The existing alternatives are, in his assessment, “weak and limited.”

The Kirkuk–Ceyhan pipeline, running from northern Iraq
to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, and the Kurdistan Region’s
connection to the same route offer only a narrow margin of maneuver, and even
that margin required direct US diplomatic intervention to unlock. The eventual
breakthrough allowed the export of around 170,000 bpd through that route:
roughly 4% of Iraq’s pre-crisis production. Overland transport through Jordan
and Syria, meanwhile, remains expensive and structurally incapable of meeting
large-scale export needs.

Why Baghdad Keeps Not Deciding

Why does a country with Iraq’s endowment operate with
this level of structural exposure? Najm Abdul Tarish, economic expert and
political science professor at Dhi Qar University, does not soften the
diagnosis: the Ministry of Oil, he told Shafaq News, “was not managed according
to clear professional and economic foundations; It was in many cases subject to
political balancing and internal conflicts, making it closer to an arena for
distributing spoils rather than an institution managing a sovereign resource.”

The political economy of that dysfunction has a
specific logic. Decisions requiring large capital commitments, long time
horizons, and benefits that accrue across political cycles —tanker fleet
reconstruction, overseas storage, pipeline diversification— are systematically
disadvantaged in an environment where what gets funded is what produces visible
returns within a single budget cycle and can be attributed to a specific
political actor. Upstream production investment fits that profile. Export
infrastructure, whose value is defensive and only becomes legible during a
crisis, does not.

On overseas storage specifically, Abdul Tarish noted
that Iraq exports around 70% of its oil to Asian markets and should have had a
distributed network of storage facilities in those countries for emergency use.
Saudi Arabia holds an estimated 140 million barrels in external storage
capacity; Iran, through floating storage, maintains roughly 190 million
barrels. Iraq holds nothing equivalent. That absence, he argued, “reflects a
clear deficiency in managing the oil resource, particularly given the heavy reliance
on maritime export through sensitive corridors like the Strait of Hormuz.”

The pattern is not new. After the 2014 oil price
crash, emergency reform discussions multiplied across Baghdad’s ministries.
When prices recovered, the discussions dissolved. Each crisis generates the
same cycle: alarm, contingency proposals, and then —once the immediate fiscal
pressure eases— a return to structural inaction. The March 2026 disruption
reproduced that cycle in accelerated form: emergency meetings were convened,
contingency plans drafted, and progress stalled as government formation negotiations
consumed the political bandwidth that infrastructure decisions require.

“As long as the Ministry of Oil remains subject to
political balancing, with no genuine expertise or sound governance, Iraq will
remain unable to manage its resources properly, despite holding oil potential
that could have placed it in a far more stable and influential position in
global markets,” Abdul Tarish concluded.

What a Solution Requires

The technical components of a solution are neither
obscure nor beyond Iraq’s financial means. Overseas storage in Asian
destination markets —where 84% of the crude that moved through the Strait of
Hormuz was destined in 2024 —would shift Iraq from a seller dependent on
continuous throughput to a market actor capable of absorbing short-term
disruptions. A rebuilt tanker fleet would restore basic logistics autonomy. The
Basra–Aqaba pipeline, long discussed and never built, would run from Iraq’s
southern oil hub to Jordan’s Red Sea port, providing an export route that
bypasses the Gulf entirely.

Iraq’s actual response to the Hormuz closure
illustrated how far the country sits from any of those structural solutions.
Economic analyst Mohammed Al-Hassani told our agency that exporting oil via
fuel tanker trucks through Syrian territory to the Baniyas refinery, with
convoys reaching 180 trucks, “is considered an immediate, limited-impact
treatment, given its high operational cost and the negligible quantities that
can be transported compared to daily Gulf export volumes.” The improvisation
contained the immediate damage without touching the underlying architecture.
Al-Hassani concluded that Iraq’s handling of the crisis “was limited to
containing consequences through temporary solutions, without any fundamental
treatment that guarantees the sustainability and stability of its oil sector
over the long term.”

Dhurgham Mohammed Ali framed the post-crisis
obligation plainly: route diversification is no longer an option but “an
economic and security necessity.” The Basra–Aqaba pipeline is the priority. The
financing mechanisms exist. The demand from Asian buyers for a diversified,
secure supply is real and commercially motivating. What has been absent
—consistently, across administrations that understood the problem— is the
political commitment to treat export infrastructure as a national priority
rather than a deferrable line item, and the institutional continuity to execute
across more than one budget cycle.

The March 2026 crisis has made the cost of that
deferral concrete and measurable in a way that policy assessments could not. A
country that funds the overwhelming share of its government through a single
commodity, exports that commodity through a single corridor it cannot defend or
bypass, and lacks the storage or fleet to buffer any interruption, is not
managing an oil sector. It is running a structural fiscal emergency on a slow
timer —and the timer has now, at least once, gone off.

The oil is Iraq’s. The conditions under which it
reaches markets are largely not, and that gap, after decades of deferred
decisions, is now a live crisis rather than a theoretical one.

Read more: Iraq’s energy vulnerability: When a petro-state has no buffer

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.