ISTANBUL — Iraq’s new oil minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi, conceded at an energy summit here on Nov. 19 that he inherited a depleted budget and that the central government now values an oil pipeline from the Kurdish area of Iraq to Turkey whose construction Baghdad once bitterly opposed.
Mahdi answered questions from Al-Monitor in a brief interview a day after Baghdad transferred $500 million to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in return for the KRG starting to pump 150,000 barrels a day of Kurdish oil into the Iraqi state petroleum company’s storage tanks at Ceyhan, Turkey.