Iraq/Kurdistan: Iraq's Big Kurdish Oil Deal

Dec 3, 2014 | Vivienna Walt, Fortune
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You almost have to hand it to ISIS. The brutal terror group has stormed across Syria and Iraq, gobbling up territory and sparking turmoil across the region. And on Tuesday, it unwittingly pulled off what the U.S. government and major oil companies have failed to accomplish for years: It united two bitterly divided oil-producing governments, Iraq and Kurdistan, over how to distribute their immense natural wealth.Iraqi Finance Minister Hoshyar Zebari announced on Tuesday that Iraq and the country’s autonomous Kurdistan region—Iraq’s three northernmost provinces—had agreed on a system to export the Kurds’ rocketing oil production and to share the profits, with the Kurds receiving 17% of Iraq’s overall budget, something Kurdistan has battled for years to secure; until now Baghdad has doled out only 12% of its money to the Kurds, much of which comes from its giant oil fields in in the South. At least on paper, the deal finally ends a dispute that has raged ever since Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship collapsed in 2003, threatening to tear the country apart and spark an all-out civil war.