Before the drone came the contract fight over where Khor Mor’s gas goes
Since August, Erbil has accused the field’s operators of breaching their contract by selling gas directly to Baghdad. The target of Sunday’s strike sits at the centre of that dispute.
On 4 August 2026, Dana Gas of the UAE and Crescent Petroleum of the UK, joint operators of the Kurdistan Gas Project, announced they had begun delivering 100 million standard cubic feet per day from Khor Mor to the Kirkuk Taza power station, under an agreement the companies said was signed with Iraq’s federal Ministry of Electricity in December 2025 for an initial one-year term. The KRG called it a breach. In a statement carried by Rudaw, it said “the operators' unilateral decision to commence gas supplies without the KRG’s approval and outside the contractual framework governing the Khor Mor project constitutes a breach of their contractual obligations and represents an unwarranted interference in the institutional arrangements governing the relationship between the KRG and the Federal Government,” and said it was reviewing legal options. On 7 August the companies told Reuters the deal complied strictly with their exclusive marketing rights and required no KRG approval.
The field has been struck repeatedly. Shafaq’s own timeline lists a drone attack in January 2024; an April 2024 strike that killed four foreign workers; a 2 February 2025 attack causing no casualties or damage; and a 26 November 2025 strike that set a gas storage tank alight and halted supply to power plants. Dana Gas said that last one was carried out with a missile, not a drone, damaging a main condensate storage tank with no injuries; Kurdistan24 reported an 80 percent power reduction across the Region and described it as the eleventh strike on the field in recent years — the outlet’s count, not an official register. Recovery was fast. KRG Prime Minister Masrour Barzani thanked “the Kurdistani people for their patience and resilience” and said production would restart “in the next several hours.”
Assessment: Khor Mor is now worth hitting for more reasons than it was two years ago. It lights the Kurdistan Region, it supplies a federal power station in Kirkuk under a deal Erbil says it never approved, and it is operated by Emirati and British companies whose appetite for Iraqi risk is the slowest thing to repair. That breadth of motive is the practical reason nobody claims these strikes and why attribution-by-timing is cheap. Watch two measurable things this week rather than the rhetoric: how many hours until production restarts, and whether the Kirkuk Taza flow resumes with it or quietly does not.