Authored by Zainab Calucuttawala via OilPrice.com,
As the date of the Kurdish independence referendum approaches, oil industry moguls should be concerned about an oil production war between Iran and headless Iraq.
The Kurds are expected to vote on their political status in late September. A vote in the affirmative would mean that Iraq would lose a chunk of its northern areas, which includes the crucial Kirkuk oilfield and its surrounding reserves.
In a move that was entirely expected, Iraq's Supreme Court has ruled that the Iraqi Kurdistan independence referendum scheduled for September 25 cannot take place. The ruling comes as Turkey has begun military exercises along its border with Iraq's Kurdish region in a show of force meant to signal that Ankara will not tolerate an independent Kurdistan either. Turkey fears that its own Kurdish separatists which it has been doing internal battle with for decades will become emboldened by the existence of a Kurdish state.
Authored by Giulio Meotti via The Gatestone Institute,
Submitted by Brad Hoff via The Canary
The fires which began with the 9/11 attacks were never extinguished. They continue to burn fiercely from Afghanistan to Iraq to Syria to Yemen to North Africa, as the region and its regimes came unglued in the wake of George W. Bush’s ‘war on terror’.
Confirming Monday leaks that OPEC production had dipped last month, the just released OPEC report for the month of September confirmed that in September, OPEC produced 32.755mmb/d (according to secondary source data), a drop of 79,100 bpd, and the first monthly decline in 4 months. According to the underlying data, in the last month output increased in Nigeria (+138.3Kb/d), while declining in Libyam Gabon, Venezuela and Iraq. Saudi Arabia.