Every headline number in the Kurdistan oil file comes from a party with a stake in it
Throughput on the Ceyhan line and the share of Erbil’s budget Baghdad has actually paid are both cited as facts. Both are assertions by interested parties, and the federal counter-accounting is not public.
The northern export route reopened on 27 September 2025 after two and a half years shut over the handling of revenues between Baghdad and Erbil, OilPrice reported that December, citing Rudaw’s account of an agreement extending the arrangement to March 2026 — a three-step chain in which the State Oil Marketing Organization chief who supplied the quote is not named, and what replaced the deal after March has not been established. In April, the KDP-aligned Kurdistan24 reported that Basra crude would begin moving through the Kurdistan pipeline to Ceyhan, lifting total exports on the route to 330,000 barrels per day — a projection, not realised throughput. Al Arabiya’s Iraq index on 1 September carried the Kurdistan Region saying output had resumed at up to 230,000 bpd. Shafaq News reported a one-day interruption in March attributed by a single anonymous North Oil Company source to technical problems.
The money side rests on a February 2025 mechanism under which federal salary transfers to the Kurdistan Region were tied to Erbil moving 120 billion dinars a month in non-oil revenue to Baghdad, a linkage Shafaq News reported in May citing prior statements from both the Iraqi Finance Ministry and the KRG. Against that, The New Region reported in late June the KRG’s claim that the federal government had sent only 42 percent of the region’s budget share over the past seven years. The figure originates with the party it benefits, the official who gave it is not named in the report, and no federal counter-figure has been published. The Commons Library briefing separately records that Washington has halted some Iraqi oil export revenues as part of its pressure campaign — a lever that runs through the same pipes and the same budget.
Assessment: The pattern to hold onto is that the oil file is argued in numbers nobody audits. A KRG production claim, a KDP-aligned projection and a KRG budget-shortfall percentage are all reported as though they were measurements; loading data at Ceyhan or SOMO’s own series would settle most of it and is not in circulation. One genuinely large question sits unresolved: tertiary reference sources assert an International Chamber of Commerce arbitration placing Kurdish hydrocarbons under central authority. This desk could not verify that against the award or wire reporting and does not print it as fact — but if it stands up, it reframes every salary dispute below it, and it would arrive while Baghdad is being squeezed on revenue from Washington.