The Turkey-KRG Energy Partnership: Assessing Its Implications

Ten years after the U.S. invasion and two years after the complete withdrawal of American forces from its soil, Iraq faces a number of challenges to its long-term stability and development. These range from corruption to poor public services, from rising terrorist violence to ethnosectarian tensions in the context of a complex powersharing system. An important, but often overlooked, aspect of Iraq’s political scene concerns the dispute between the federal government and the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) over the management of the country’s and the Kurdish region’s natural resources and over appropriate revenue-sharing mechanisms. The parties have been stuck in a costly political stalemate for the past few years, as the absence of a federal hydrocarbon law has discouraged international investment in Iraq’s natural resources, and oil extracted from KRG-controlled fields has had only intermittent access to international markets.