ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq – The deputy director of Iraq’s state oil marketer on Tuesday said that the Kurdistan Region’s geographic placement could render it a “strategic and important” location for the export of oil to the European market.

“The Kurdistan Region is a neighbor to Turkey, and through this, Iraq can benefit greatly from it. [Iraq can] make Kurdistan a strategic and important center for oil sales and a route to reach European countries,” Deputy Director of Iraq's State Organization for Marketing of Oil (SOMO) Hamdi Shingali told reporters.

“It is better for Iraq to have another route for selling oil besides Basra,” the deputy director added.

Shingali asserted that the breakthrough agreement to resume the Kurdistan Region’s oil exports should give Iraq “an incentive to implement other major oil projects and connect them to Europe,” citing Kurdistan Region’s Prime Minister Masrour Barzani’s “fundamental and impactful projects” across the Region.

Exports of crude oil from the Kurdistan Region through the Iraq-Turkey pipeline resumed in late September after a 30-month halt, following the signing of a breakthrough agreement between Erbil, Baghdad, and international oil companies operating in the Region.

Per the agreement, the Kurdistan Region will deliver “all crude oil” produced from its fields to SOMO for it to be exported through the Iraq-Turkey pipeline, apart from quantities allocated for domestic use.

Iraqi Oil Minister Hayyan Abdul Ghani told state media on Saturday that “over one million barrels of oil” have been received by Baghdad from the Kurdistan Region since the resumption of the Region’s exports.

The Kurdistan Region’s oil exports through Turkey’s Ceyhan port had been halted since March 2023, when a Paris-based arbitration court ruled that Ankara had breached a 1973 pipeline agreement by allowing Erbil to start selling oil independently in 2014, awarding the case to Baghdad.