A drone hits the field that lights Kurdistan, two days before Barzani asks Baghdad for money
Production at Khor Mor was suspended after a suspected drone strike on 8 November, blacking out much of the Kurdistan Region. No one has claimed it, and the budget talks it sits alongside remain unresolved.
Operator Dana Gas said in a statement issued Monday 9 November that production at the Khor Mor gas field had been suspended after a suspected drone strike late on Sunday 8 November set a liquefied petroleum gas storage tank alight. Regional electricity officials described a single drone; Kurdistan authorities call Khor Mor the primary fuel source for the region’s power plants, and the strike produced a widespread blackout. The Files reached the Dana Gas statement through an aggregator, The Verardo Group’s 10 November brief, which cites The Jerusalem Post and Reuters; we have not yet seen the Reuters original or the company release, and readers should weight it accordingly. No party has claimed the strike. The operator’s own word is “suspected”. The New Region notes that during the US–Iran war, drone and missile strikes by Iran and Iraqi pro-Iran armed groups hit civilian and energy infrastructure across the region.
The sequencing matters. KRG Prime Minister Masrour Barzani travelled to Baghdad on Monday 9 November to discuss the Kurdistan Region’s financial entitlements, The New Region reports, and held a press conference in Erbil on Tuesday 10 November saying Erbil and Baghdad would cooperate on preventing attacks. In Baghdad on 9 November, standing with Barzani, Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi said Iraq aims to lift crude output to 7 million barrels a day by 2030 and 10 million by 2032, including roughly 1 million from the Kurdistan Region — an announcement, not an event. Meanwhile Kurdistan24 reported ahead of a planned Tuesday cabinet session on the 2027 federal budget that negotiations with the KRG were still open on the Region’s share, public-sector salaries, and a requirement that the KRG export 450,000 barrels per day. Whether the cabinet met, and whether that condition survived, is not established.
Assessment: The 450,000 bpd condition is the number to watch, because it is a condition rather than a forecast. Set it against the 500,000 bpd of total Ceyhan throughput reported on 2 November by Kurdistan24 and OilPrice — a figure Kurdistan24 itself says no official confirmed, and which includes Kirkuk and trucked Basrah crude — and Baghdad is asking Erbil to supply almost the whole northern export stream from Kurdish fields alone. Resist the tidy reading that an unclaimed strike was timed to the negotiation. Nobody has claimed it, no attribution has been offered by any government, and an unclaimed drone is an argument for whoever wants to make one. What is measurable is the restart date.