Up to three-quarters of the oil supply in Israel was reported from Iraqi Kurdistan, a Financial Times report said Sunday.
Between May and August 2011, 19 million barrels of oil from Kurdistan were imported by Israel, according to shipping data, trading sources and satellite tanker tracking. This would be worth about $1 billion
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“That is the equivalent of about 77 per cent of average Israeli demand, “, says FT, “which runs at roughly 240, 000 barrels per day”.
Many Middle Eastern countries, refuses to recognise and has no official ties with Israel.
The KRG would not say it sold oil to Israel “directly or indirectly, ” though a senior Kurdish adviser said that “We do not care where the oil goes once we have delivered it to the traders.”
“Our priority is getting the cash to fund our Peshmerga forces against Daesh [Isis] and to pay civil servant salaries.”
The rest of Israel’s oil supply reportedly came from Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, though Israel does not report on this information officially.
Financial times added that the oil sales are a sign of a growing disconnect between the Kurdish state and Iraq proper.
It is also a sign, the report said, of Kurdistan’s growth in the international market as Italy, Greece and France are also apparently getting more and more of their oil from the Kurds.
