Iran has been working to strengthen its ties and gain influence in the Iraqi energy sector in the last couple of months
Iran has long held enormous political, economic, and military sway over neighbouring Iraq.Iraq as a whole offers an uncrackable way of smuggling Iranian and Russian crude oil.Iran has long held enormous political, economic, and military sway over neighbouring Iraq through its various military and political proxies, and since the discovery of vast reservoirs of oil in Iran first in the early 1900s and shortly after in Iraq, Tehran has an added incentive to retain this influence and to enhance it.
First, on the Iraq Kurdistan question, Iran regards this as its own problem, not just Iraq’s. The reason why, as hinted at in the death of Ms. Amini, is that Iran - and Iraq, and Turkey, and Syria – all have very sizeable Kurdish populations of their own. In Iran’s case, about 15 percent of its population is Kurdish, about the same proportion as in neighbouring Iraq, while Turkey has 18 percent Kurdish population and Syria around 16 percent.
There is another compelling reason for Iran’s sudden resurgence of interest in broadening its on-the-ground presence in Iraq, north and south, which is that Iraq as a whole offers an uncrackable way of smuggling out its oil, and that of Russia incidentally, into the rest of the world, despite sanctions. As also analysed in depth in, it is impossible to distinguish Iraqi oil from Iranian oil in the oil fields that are shared between the two neighbouring countries.