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Welcome to This Week in Iraq, your one-stop source for all of the most important Iraq news, curated by the editors of Iraq Oil Report. To sign up and receive this free newsletter in your inbox every week click here.
Top Stories
Iraq is still gripped by uncertainty even after the announcement of a temporary ceasefire agreement between Iran and the U.S. One open question is whether Iranian promises to reopen the Strait of Hormuz will actually result in enough ship traffic to support a restart of Iraqi exports via Basra Gulf outlets. Iraq's oil marketing company, SOMO, issued two memos to buyers on April 5, soliciting interest for cargoes of both crude and high-sulfur fuel oil to be loaded from Basra, according to documents seen by Iraq Oil Report. But there is no indication yet that any buyers have lined up.
Another open question is whether the ceasefire deal will extend to Iraq, where proxy conflicts have grown into a parallel war with its own logic of escalation that could prove difficult to reverse. Just before the ceasefire agreement, southern Iraq's oil sector suffered from the most intense single day of drone attacks it has ever seen, with five oil sites being hit. Most of the targets were associated with American companies, highlighting questions about how the war will alter Iraq's risk profile for investors even if the Iran ceasefire endures.
Iraq's oil sector is scrambling for backup plans as the Iran war has exposed the country's over-reliance on a single oil export route. In an interview with Iraq Oil Report, Ali Shaddad al-Faris, a member of Parliament from Basra who has long served on the Oil, Gas, and Natural Resources Committee, discussed emergency efforts to ramp up secondary export routes and the likely impact of extended oil field shutdowns on production costs and reservoir health.
Energy & Economy
Iraq’s Cabinet has approved additional emergency oil-shipping and transport measures to keep refinery operations going during the Hormuz disruption, The Iraqi News Agency reports. The government authorized the Iraqi Oil Tankers Company to lease available tankers in the Gulf region for storage or other uses aimed at extending refinery operations when sales are not possible, and approved overland crude transport contracts from Khor Al-Zubair to northern crossings in Kirkuk. The Cabinet also exempted SOMO from normal contract implementation instructions to let it procure fuel for factories and strengthen strategic reserves, while separately moving forward on the Basra-Haditha crude pipeline by allowing the Oil Ministry to directly invite specialized companies to bid.
Iraq's North Oil Company says it has doubled the capacity of the K1 station to 90,000 barrels and is now fully ready to receive crude trucked from Basra and pump it toward Ceyhan, the Iraqi News Agency reports. Trucks have already begun loading crude in Basra. NOC Director General Amer Khalil Ahmed also says work is continuing at fields in Kirkuk, Salahaddin, and Ninewa provinces to raise production and export capacity in order to compensate for lost southern outlets.
Security
Hadi al-Amiri is trying to broker a temporary truce between Iraqi armed factions and U.S. forces, Shafaq News reports. The effort by the Badr Organization leader are focused on outreach to Kataib Hezbollah and Harakat al-Nujaba, and are modeled on last month’s five-day truce, which reportedly helped pause attacks on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.
American journalist Shelly Kittleson has been released following her March 31 abduction in Baghdad by Kataib Hezbollah, the BBC reports. This was part of a detainee exchange, the AP reports.
Politics
The Iraqi Parliament is scheduled to convene on April 11, in another attempt to move the government formation process forward by electing a president. Past efforts have been derailed by a combination of overlapping disagreements — between Iraqi Kurdistan's two dominant political parties, over who should be the presidential nominee; and within the Shia Coordination Framework, over who should be the candidate for prime minister. The president cannot be elected without a two-thirds quorum in Parliament, which means even relatively small political parties have outsize power in delaying the proceedings by refusing to attend. The election of the president is the only item listed on an official Parliament agenda document, which was seen by Iraq Oil Report.
Analysis & Commentary
Tehran offered to allow Iraqi oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz to preserve its political foundation in Baghdad, Iranian scholar Hamidreza Azizi writes in Amwaj Media's Iran war situation report. Iranian strategic thinking now frames Iraq’s continued access through Hormuz not simply as a friendly exception but as a deliberate tool to preserve Iraqi economic stability and, by extension, the position of Tehran’s allies in Baghdad. The piece also says some Iranian voices are moving from temporary wartime control toward a harder argument that Hormuz access could be conditioned on compensation, transit fees, and a new postwar passage regime.
The new Iraq-U.S. coordination mechanism is running into the same old problem: Baghdad formally signs security frameworks, but still cannot fully control the armed groups whose actions keep pulling Iraq back into escalation, Shafaq News argues. The underlying structural problem is that Baghdad regards its Popular Mobilization Forces as a sovereign state institution, while Washington treats most of the PMF's constituent groups as Iran-aligned non-state actors.
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