Iraq on Saturday resumed crude exports from the autonomous Kurdistan region to Turkey, state media said, after a more than two-year halt over legal and technical disputes.

Control over lucrative oil exports has been a major point of contention between Baghdad and Arbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region, with a key pipeline to Turkey shut since 2023.

The official INA press agency announced the “resumption of oil exports from the fields of Iraq’s Kurdistan Region,” ending the longstanding hiatus in the energy-rich region.

The director of Iraq’s State Oil Marketing Organization (SOMO), Ali Nizar, confirmed to Agence France-Presse that oil exports from Kurdistan via the Iraq-Turkey pipeline had started.

SOMO will receive 190,000 barrels per day for export and another 50,000 bpd for domestic consumption, Nizar said.

Oil exports were previously independently sold by the Kurdish authorities, without the approval or oversight of the federal authorities in Baghdad, through the port of Ceyhan in Turkey.

But the region’s official oil exports have been frozen since March 2023 when the arbitration tribunal of the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris ruled oil exports by the regional government were illegal and said Baghdad had the exclusive right to market all Iraqi oil.

In July Baghdad and Arbil had agreed that the Kurdistan region would resume delivering all oil produced in the region’s fields to SOMO for export.

On Thursday the federal and Kurdish authorities reached another deal with international oil companies operating in the autonomous region to resume crude exports.

The Association of the Petroleum Industry of Kurdistan (APIKUR), which represents international oil companies operating in the region, put losses to Iraq since the pipeline closed at more than $35 billion.

On Wednesday eight international oil companies operating in Kurdistan said they agreed to resume exports via the Iraq–Turkey pipeline.

The deal stipulates that the companies would meet with the Kurdish authorities within 30 days of resuming exports “to work towards creating a mechanism for settling the outstanding debts” owed to the firms.

The Kurdistan region is in arrears of $1 billion to oil companies.

The Norwegian group DNO ASA announced it was not joining the deal, saying that resuming exports should be “pursuant to agreements that ensure payment surety.”

© Agence France-Presse