HALABJA, Kurdistan Region of Iraq – The Iraqi Oil Ministry and the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) Ministry of Natural Resources on Wednesday agreed on the terms to resume the export of the Kurdistan Region’s oil through the Iraqi State Organization for Marketing of Oil (SOMO), with 17 members of the Iraqi delegation and six members of the Kurdish delegation signing the draft.

In a statement on Wednesday, the KRG’s Ministry of Natural Resources said that “the Ministry of Natural Resources of the Kurdistan Regional Government and the Iraqi Ministry of Oil have reached an agreement on the mechanism of oil exports, and the agreement was signed by 23 members of the delegations of both sides, including 17 members of the delegation of the Iraqi Oil Ministry.”

The ministry noted that the agreement comes after many discussions since negotiations started in July and visits by ministry personnel to all of the Region's oilfields for technical assessments. The amount exported depends on the oil field’s production capacity, according to the statement, with the KRG retaining 50,000 barrels for local consumption while the rest will be handed over to the federal government for export.

“What remains to resume the Kurdistan Region’s oil exports is for the federal government to communicate with the Turkish government and implement the process,” the ministry’s statement added.

A source from SOMO told The New Region earlier on Wednesday that the company had “completed all preparations to resume exporting the Kurdistan Region’s oil,” adding that they had reached an agreement with Erbil regarding the resumption.

Exports of the Kurdistan Region’s oil through the Turkish Ceyhan pipeline were halted in March 2023 after Ankara lost a case against Baghdad in a Paris-based arbitration court. The case accused Ankara of breaching a 1973 agreement by allowing the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to start selling oil independently of Baghdad.

The halt in oil exports through the Ceyhan pipeline in recent years has dealt a major blow to Iraq and the Kurdistan Region, with over 30 billion dollars in lost revenue to date.

A source in the KRG’s Ministry of Finance and Economy told The New Region last week that a solution to the issue of the resumption of the Region's oil exports has "come very close."

The Iraqi government’s finance ministry in May decided to suspend funding the Kurdistan Region’s civil servant salaries, arguing that the Region had already exhausted its share of the annual budget in May. The two governments have been engaged in numerous meetings to address their disagreements over oil exports and domestic revenue.

The Region’s civil servant salaries for the month of May were disbursed in late July after months of deliberation between the two governments, with June and July salaries yet to be disbursed as of the time of writing this article.