An overnight rocket attack on one of the largest gas fields in Iraq caused major power outages across most of the country’s semiautonomous Kurdistan region on Thursday, local authorities said.
The strike at Khor Mor gas field in the northern Kurdistan region came shortly after midnight and was the latest in a string of drone and rocket attacks targeting Kurdish-run oil and gas infrastructure in recent months.
Prime minister Mohammed al-Sudani condemned the strike as an “attack on all of Iraq,” but Iraqi authorities have not publicly said who they believe to be behind the attacks.
Privately, Iraqi and Kurdish officials have blamed recent attacks on local militias aligned with neighboring Iran. The militias have previously been accused of attacking U.S. interests in Iraq, and could see Kurdistan, which has close economic and diplomatic ties with Washington, as a lower-level target.
The U.S. envoy to Iraq, Mark Savaya, alluded to those militias in a statement posted on X, blaming the attack on “armed groups operating illegally and driven by hostile foreign agendas.”
One of Iraq’s most powerful militias, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, which was once close to Iran but has sought to distance itself from Tehran in recent years, denied any involvement and called for a national investigation. Other militias have remained silent.
Iraqi Kurdistan’s electrical authorities said power supplies in the region were reduced by 75 percent, but that they would be restored within 48 hours. Residents reported waking up in darkness early Thursday morning, finding their homes without internet or electricity.
“This attack targeted the economic infrastructure and public services of Iraq and the Kurdistan Region and is a direct threat to the security and stability of the country,” Nechirvan Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan region said in a statement, calling on Iraq’s federal government to “hold the perpetrators of this crime accountable.”
The militias emerged in 2014 as a popular mobilization of Shiite Iraqis to fight an insurgency by the Islamic State group. Many of those militias were financially and logistically supported by Iran, the regional Shiite power.
Though Islamic State was largely defeated, the militias have remained. Most are now financially independent from Iran, but are still politically tied, and they have become an entrenched presence in Iraqi politics.
That has stoked fresh tensions at a time when Iran’s influence is much diminished across the Middle East.
Since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on southern Israel, which were led by Hamas, a militant group supported by Iran, Israel has gone after many Iran-backed groups. It killed the influential leader of the Lebanese militant group, Hezbollah, Iran’s most important ally in the region, and last summer launched a war on Iran, briefly joined by U.S. war planes, that battered Iran’s nuclear and military sites.
Though Iran wields substantial political influence there, Iraq has largely escaped the regional conflagration. But it is under increasing U.S. pressure to disarm the Iran-linked militias, some of whom have positions in the current government and won seats in Iraq’s parliamentary elections earlier this month.
The rocket attack comes days before the United States is set to open a new consulate in Iraqi Kurdistan. The latest strike could be linked to that, according to Ramzy Mardini, the founder of Geopol Labs, a Middle East-based geopolitical risk advisory firm.
“I’m sure the Iranians have noticed,” Mr. Mardini said. “Having been attacked by the U.S. earlier this year, including the targeting of its nuclear program, Iran may be credibly signaling that their proxies will target American allies next door should another campaign ensue.”
Some Kurdish officials said the attacks may be the result of domestic rivalries. There are longstanding tensions over power sharing and oil revenues between Kurdistan and the Iraqi federal government, which is led by a Shiite coalition that includes some of the militias.
The Khor Mor field accounts for 80 percent of the Kurdistan region’s power production.
Kurdish officials have been pushing for the United States and the United Kingdom to sell them antiaircraft and anti-drone defense equipment to protect their infrastructure. But Iraq’s federal government has refused to approve the purchase of the systems, seeing them as weaponry that should be under federal control. Washington and other Western countries have refused to provide the systems to the Kurdistan region without Baghdad’s approval.
In a statement on X after the attacks, Masrour Barzani, the prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan, called for the United States and other countries to offer direct sales to the region, “to provide the defensive equipment necessary to protect our civilian infrastructure, and to support us in taking serious action to deter these attacks on our people and our progress.”
Falih Hassan contributed reporting from Baghdad
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