Iraq’s own export figures for August and September differ by seventy per cent, and no primary document reconciles them

The structural fact behind everything in Iraq’s export file this year is the Strait of Hormuz, which Bloomberg reported shut on 2 June as Baghdad moved to raise volumes through Ceyhan. Whether it is still shut today is not something this desk can confirm, and the answer determines whether the Turkish route is Iraq’s main outlet or a supplementary one. The Kurdistan Region restored Ceyhan exports on 5 March, per Shafaq News, after an export arrangement with Baghdad that OilPrice.com reported extended to March 2026; by April, Kurdistan24 — KDP-aligned, and to be read as such — reported Basra crude moving through the Kurdish pipeline. On 1 August, Al Jazeera reported Iraq and Türkiye signing a one-year pipeline deal. A Kurdistan24 social-media card the same day summarised al-Zaidi as saying the agreement guarantees a minimum of 750,000 barrels a day and opens cooperation on energy, electricity and water. That is a figure worth chasing, not a quote worth running.

Then the numbers diverge. Azernews reported on 2 August that Iraq planned to double Ceyhan throughput to 1.5 million barrels a day — thin sourcing, almost certainly downstream of a wire the desk has not located. Asharq Al-Awsat’s English service reported on 9 August that Iraqi oil exports had fallen to 1.75 million barrels a day; we have the headline and the date, not the body, and cannot say whether that is a monthly average, a weekly figure, or southern exports rather than the national total. On 14 September, Iraq Business News carried a projection that exports would hit three million barrels a day in September. Between those two figures sits a rise of roughly seventy per cent in a month. One primary document settles it: SOMO’s monthly export statement, which publishes volume, revenue and average sale price together.

Assessment: Two disciplines are being confused here, one of them deliberately by someone. A national total and a southern loading rate are different quantities, and governments under fiscal pressure have an interest in letting the larger one travel. Note what is being negotiated alongside the barrels: the August deal was reported to open cooperation on water as well as energy, which puts Ceyhan and the Tigris headwaters inside the same file. A twelve-month term expiring in August 2027 gives Ankara an annual re-pricing right over Iraq’s alternative to a closed strait. That is the leverage story, and it survives whichever export figure turns out to be real.