MEFILES

Drone strike at Khor Mor halts production and takes up to 2.8 gigawatts off the grid

Dana Gas says its Kurdistan field was hit by a suspected drone late Sunday and remains shut. The KRG says five cities lost gas-fired power. No one has claimed responsibility.

The strike came at about 23:00 local on Sunday 8 November, hitting an LPG storage unit at the Khor Mor field in Chamchamal district, Sulaymaniyah province, and starting a fire. Reuters first reported the halt that night on the basis of two Kurdistan Region electricity ministry sources and two security sources, all anonymous, who said staff had been evacuated to shelters inside the facility. Operator Dana Gas (PJSC), which is based in the UAE, told the market the following day that Khor Mor “was subject to a suspected drone attack on the night of 8 November 2026, which caused a fire,” that production remained suspended and that damage was being assessed after the fire was put out. No staff were injured. Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi said on 9 November, via Reuters' Arabic service, that preliminary assessment indicated no loss of life.

The power consequence is the part officials have quantified. Omed Ahmed, spokesman for the KRG Ministry of Electricity, told Al Jazeera and the state news agency INA that gas supply was cut to plants serving Erbil, Sulaimaniyah, Bazian, Chamchamal and Duhok, and that generation on the national grid would fall by between 2.5 and 2.8 gigawatts; to the Iraqi outlet 964 Network the same official rounded the loss to about 3,000 MW. Al Jazeera reported that more than 70 percent of the Kurdistan Region was left without power, without publishing a methodology. A joint statement from the KRG’s ministries of natural resources and electricity called it “a terrorist attack” and named no perpetrator. Reuters notes the field has suffered repeated drone attacks and output disruptions since 2022, which Kurdish officials have blamed on Iran-linked militias — an attribution Reuters does not itself endorse.

The only geography attached to the launch point comes from two Iraqi security sources who told Reuters, anonymously, that preliminary information pointed to an area east of Tuz Khurmatu, roughly 80 kilometres away. That is the single most consequential claim in the story and it is both unattributed and provisional. Washington moved faster than Baghdad did: Tom Barrack, the US presidential envoy to Iraq, condemned the strike in a post on X on Monday. The Iraqi outlet 964 Network published an Arabic translation rendering him as calling it “an attack on the Iraqi people” and pledging support for al-Zaidi and the KRG in holding those responsible to account; Euronews Arabic characterised the same post as describing a direct assault on Iraq’s stability and economy. Both are translations back from Arabic, not his English.

Assessment: Three numbers here will harden into fact if nobody stops them: the 70 percent blackout share, which has no published methodology; the 3,000 MW round figure, which is the 2.5–2.8 GW range restated by the same spokesman; and the Tuz Khurmatu launch corridor, which is two anonymous officers' preliminary read. Each is plausible. None is established. The detail that will matter politically is the one nobody in the official statements touches: the operator is Emirati, and Kataib Hezbollah has been publicly accusing al-Zaidi’s government of cutting deals with the UAE. That is the thread into the second story, and it is why the absence of a claim of responsibility is itself information.

Al-Zaidi is reported to be waiting on Framework consent before moving against armed factions

Two interested outlets, both relaying anonymous Iraqi sourcing, describe a prime minister who cannot arrest faction members without approval from the coalition that seats them in his cabinet.

The Baghdad half of the Khor Mor story is entirely claimed, not confirmed. Al-Mada reported on Monday 9 November, citing sources close to the prime minister’s office, that Ali al-Zaidi is awaiting authorisation from the Shiite Coordination Framework to arrest members of Iran-backed armed factions operating outside state control, and that he has ordered a joint investigation with the Kurdistan Regional Government. Al-Mada placed the attacks against a background of rising friction between the government and factions including Kataib Hezbollah, which has accused al-Zaidi and members of his cabinet of conducting deals with the United Arab Emirates. The Files has not read the Al-Mada original: the account reaches us through the liveblog of Iran International, an outlet with a declared editorial position on Tehran. That is a chain of anonymous sources, one Iraqi paper and one interested relay.

The second strand is no better sourced and travels in the opposite direction politically. Alhurra, funded by the US Agency for Global Media, published an item on 9 November labelled exclusive in which a source in the office of a senior Coordination Framework figure described the coalition as divided over al-Zaidi’s handling of Kataib Hezbollah. Its only on-the-record voice is Mukhlad Hazem, a former Iraqi army officer and commentator rather than a participant, who said negotiations between a Framework committee and factions refusing to surrender their weapons “appear to have failed” and that the factions had “begun attempting to impose their will on al-Zaidi.” The piece further reports, citing sources who spoke to other Iraqi outlets, that al-Zaidi rejected a written disarmament agreement with conditions and a timetable. That document has not been produced.

What is on the record is the arithmetic around him. The New Arab reported earlier this year, citing two Coordination Framework lawmakers and a source close to the government, that the Framework met with al-Zaidi present and declined to give him unrestricted authority to extend his anti-corruption campaign to figures and entities linked to armed factions; he told its leaders he would continue in coordination with Supreme Judicial Council President Faeq Zaidan. On 16 October, per Euronews Arabic, parliament approved 11 ministers and three deputy prime ministers, closing portfolios vacant since he was sworn in on 14 May with 14 of 23 ministers — Naif al-Shammari at defence, Yasser al-Maliki at interior, and Laith al-Khazali among the deputy premiers. In late September the cabinet approved and referred to parliament a draft law that The National said would entrench the Popular Mobilisation Forces as a permanent state institution.

Assessment: Both relays have an interest in the same portrait: a prime minister boxed in by Iran-aligned gunmen. Discount for that. What survives the discount is the connective tissue, and it is why this claim is worth chasing rather than binning — the field that burned is run by an Emirati company, and the accusation Kataib Hezbollah has been making in public is that this government is doing business with the Emirates. Watch for three things that would convert claim into event: an actual arrest with a named judicial warrant, a Framework statement rather than a Framework source, and a parliamentary vote on the PMF law. Three weeks ago he was seating faction-aligned figures at deputy-PM level.

A 500,000-barrel Ceyhan figure has circulated for a week with no official behind it

The number rests on one North Oil Company source and a pipeline shareholder’s social media post. The best shipping-data estimate available puts early-October flows at about 328,000 barrels a day.

Kurdistan24 reported on 2 November, through its Kirkuk correspondent Soran Kamaran, that total Iraqi crude moving through Ceyhan had reached 500,000 bpd on the evening of Sunday 1 November — the highest since flows through Turkish territory were restored. The outlet attributed the figure to a single North Oil Company source and said plainly in its own text that no official had confirmed it. It separately cited Iraqi local media quoting three NOC sources putting the rise at nearly 43 percent, from 350,000 bpd. The strongest attribution is also the most interested: Baz Karim Barzanji, head of the Erbil-based KAR Group, a shareholder in the Kurdistan Pipeline Company, wrote on 31 October that exports had doubled from 250,000 to 500,000 bpd. IraqiNews published a composition breakdown — 200,000 bpd of Basra crude trucked north, 175,000 from Kurdistan Region fields, 125,000 from Kirkuk. Oilprice aggregated it; Iraq Business News recycled it on 8 November with no new sourcing.

A different method produces a different picture. The National reported on 6 November, citing an Iraq Oil Report analysis of Ceyhan shipping data, a seven-day export average to 5 October of about 328,000 bpd — up sharply from under 200,000 bpd in September, but well short of the half-million mark. The two series are not strictly contradictory: different dates, different instruments. One counts tankers, the other repeats what a producer says is in the pipe. The mechanics underneath are not in dispute. Basra crude is trucked to collection points at Sarallu and Khurmala and pumped into the Iraq–Turkey line through the Kurdistan Region. The Baghdad–Ankara pipeline treaty expired in the summer; exports now run on an extension arranged with Turkish state operator BOTAS, after what Khazal Hostani of the KRG’s natural resources ministry described in July as a one-year temporary protocol, with more than 200,000 bpd flowing at that point.

Assessment: This is how a single-source number becomes infrastructure. A correspondent’s caveat survives the first publication and dies in the aggregation; by the eighth day it is being restated as established without any official ever having put his name to it. The people quoted have reasons to want the larger figure believed — a pipeline shareholder, a producer’s staff, a Baghdad–Erbil–Ankara arrangement that needs to look like it is working while its legal basis is a one-year patch. Use the tanker series and show its sample. And note what Sunday night demonstrated about the fragility of everything this desk counts in barrels and gigawatts.