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.