IRAQ. The Case for Revaluation

Running with a different angle today. Bear with me.

I wanted to welcome all the members who have signed up to a free account and attempt to answer the same question that keeps landing in my inbox every day for the past 2 weeks.

How is it actually possible that Iraq can revalue the IQD ?

The answer is not my opinion. It is a verified stack of signed contracts, dated court rulings, customs system deadlines, and central bank balance sheet moves. All of it sits on the public record and I will walk you through it in the order the architecture stacks.

If you are reading this for the first time, the answer is in the details, if you wish to spend the time to research. Iraq does not revalue because somebody just decides to. Iraq revalues because the conditions underneath the announcements line up. The conditions of those layers are what this briefing covers.

If you have followed this investment for a while, parts of this will be familiar territory. The point of putting it in one place is so the people still unsure can see the entire scaffolding in one place.

12 sections. One throughline. Receipts on every claim.

I own currency. I do not tell anyone else to. What this briefing covers is the architecture, the timing, and the order of operations. What you do with that information is yours to decide.

If you are new to this site, Chapter 1 of Head of the Snake is a free read. It carries the longer-form thesis on US-Iraq monetary architecture and the sanctions sequence that broke through in May 2026. The book sits at Head of the Snake for ebook, audiobook formats. Or Amazon Kindle if you are into that.

The political signal that reignited the conversation

January 2020. The Iraqi parliament had just voted to expel US forces after the Soleimani strike. A reporter asked President Trump how the United States planned to recover its costs if it left. The verbatim exchange:

Reporter: How are you going to collect?

Trump: Well, we have a lot of their money right now. We have a lot of their money. We have $35 billion of their money right now sitting in an account. And I think they'll agree to pay. I think they'll agree to pay. Otherwise, we'll stay there.

The $35B sitting in an account is Iraqi oil revenue held at the New York Federal Reserve. A sitting US President stated in public that the US Treasury views Iraqi sovereign wealth as collectible, and that the leverage to collect is military presence.

At today's official rate of 1,310 IQD per USD, $35B sits as roughly 45.85 trillion Iraqi dinars. The arithmetic of repayment, alongside the arithmetic of every IMF programme, every World Bank facility, and every US Treasury sanctions calendar, only resolves cleanly if the underlying currency stops trading at one-tenth of a US cent.

The rest of this briefing covers the architecture being built to make that resolution possible.

Iraq's $16 trillion in untapped resources

In 2025 the Prime Minister's financial advisor Mazhar Mohammed Saleh placed Iraq's untapped mineral and energy wealth at $16T USD. That figure ranks Iraq 9th globally for natural resource wealth. The number comes from the Iraqi government itself, not from a Western consultancy projection.

The breakdown:

Iraq oil reserves: 145 billion barrels. 5th largest in the world. 17% of Middle East reserves. 8% of global reserves. Per the US Energy Information Administration. Iraq announced an additional 8.8 billion barrel discovery in Najaf in May 2026.

Iraq natural gas reserves. Multi-trillion cubic feet of associated and non-associated gas, historically flared at the wellhead. Iraq has flared rather than monetised this gas because midstream capture infrastructure (separation, gathering, processing pipelines) was never built. Burning the gas off was cheaper than investing in capture. The TotalEnergies contract documented below corrects that gap.

Sulfur: world's largest reserves. Over 600 million tonnes, concentrated at Mishraq near Mosul.

Phosphate: 2nd globally after Morocco. 5 billion tonnes of proven reserves at 20 to 22% P2O5 content. Akashat alone holds 1.7 billion tonnes. That is 9% of global phosphate reserves.

Strategic minerals. Strategic-grade thorium and uranium discoveries in southern Iraq, plus lithium and copper MOUs signed with international exploration firms. The Zagros Mountains in the northeast carry copper, gold, and rare earth element occurrences that remain underexplored.

Central Bank of Iraq reserve build. CBI gold holdings reached 162.7 metric tonnes by February 2025, placing Iraq among the top Arab gold holders. Gold now sits at 28% of total CBI reserves. Foreign currency reserves total approximately $97.5B.

Before contracts, before customs, before any Hydrocarbon Law signature, Iraq holds verifiable extractive and monetary assets that match or exceed the scale of any country that has ever executed a managed currency revaluation.

Signed Iraq oil contracts: TotalEnergies, BP, PetroChina, Sinopec

The validation that matters most is not what the Iraqi government says. It is what foreign supermajors are willing to write cheques against. Every major Iraq oil contract signed in the past 5 years carries multi-decade capital exposure.

TotalEnergies Gas Growth Integrated Project (GGIP) — $27 billion. Signed effective August 2023. TotalEnergies 45%, Basra Oil Company 30%, QatarEnergy 25%. Within 2 years of signing, all 4 sub-projects launched. The Associated Gas Upstream Development targets 120,000 barrels per day in phase 1 at the Ratawi field, scaling to 210,000 barrels per day in phase 2. An early production facility processing 50 million cubic feet per day of associated gas began operation in early 2026. The Ar-Ratawi Gas Midstream Project eliminates flaring across 3 southern oil fields and pipes the recovered gas to local power plants. A 1 GW solar farm and a seawater treatment plant complete the stack.

A $27B commitment from a European supermajor and Qatar is not patient capital. Capital allocation committees price these decisions against 20+ year cash flow models. They priced Iraq as bankable.

West Qurna 1. PetroChina took over operatorship from ExxonMobil in November 2023. ExxonMobil's exit was a portfolio decision driven by lower per-barrel margins under Iraqi service-contract terms versus their Permian and Guyana opportunities. PetroChina stepped in at the same operating terms.

Rumaila — Iraq's largest producing field. BP partnership with PetroChina and Basra Oil Company. BP is booking 79,000 barrels per day of upstream production share into 2025.

Sinopec interests. Operating across Al-Ahdab, Halfaya, Rumaila, and West Qurna 1.

Chinese and European supermajors do not deploy multi-decade capex at billion-dollar scale without confidence in the host economy. The contract list itself is the validator.

Iraq gas fields: Khor Mor, Akkas, Mansuriya

Oil is the headline. Gas is the part most Iraqi dinar coverage skips, and it carries the highest growth ratio in the country's energy stack.

Khor Mor (Kurdistan Region). Operated by Pearl Petroleum, the consortium of Crescent Petroleum and Dana Gas. The $1.1 billion KM250 expansion completed 8 months ahead of schedule in 2025, lifting output to 750 million cubic feet per day. Pearl is targeting 825 million cubic feet per day by the end of 2026. Early completion in a resource economy is the operator telling the market the field economics are stronger than the original timetable assumed.

Akkas (Anbar province). Started partial production at 22 billion cubic feet per year in March 2023 to feed a local power plant. Schlumberger now holds the development contract, scaling initial production to 100 million cubic feet per day with a 400 million cubic feet per day target.

Mansuriya (Diyala). Estimated reserves of 4.5 trillion cubic feet. Awarded to a consortium of Chinese services provider Jereh and Petro-Iraq. Midland Oil Company 51%, Chinese-Iraqi consortium 49%. Daily production potential exceeds 300 million cubic feet.

Federal gas projection. Output is forecast to reach 4 billion cubic feet per day by 2032 if Akkas, Mansuriya, and Crescent's Round 5 acreage advance in parallel with associated gas capture from the major oil fields.

Iraq currently imports gas from Iran to feed its power grid. That dependency is the lever every US sanctions package has reached for since 2018. It shaped the sanctions calendar covered in The Pittance and the Pen and Bessent Signs the Sixth. A domestic gas stack at 4 billion cubic feet per day removes the lever. Sanctions-proof revenue. Sanctions-proof power. A currency cannot be cleanly revalued while the country is one sanctions waiver away from blackouts.

Iraq infrastructure: Al Faw Grand Port and the Development Road

Resources without ports and roads stay in the ground. Iraq is building both.

Al Faw Grand Port. Sits at the head of the Gulf. $2.7 billion contract awarded to Daewoo Engineering in December 2020. The full master plan calls for 99 berths total across phases, with 46 container berths carrying a 7-kilometre quay length and an eventual 25 million TEU annual capacity.

In May 2026, the then current, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani opened the first 5 container berths, totalling 1,750 metres of quay, with experimental ships already docking. The immersed tunnel project has reached 7 of 10 concrete sections submerged. Phase 1 of the port is targeted for completion in 2028, with an annual container handling capacity of 4 million TEU at that stage. Full master-plan completion runs to 2038. Abu Dhabi Ports Company is finalising the operating agreement.

The port is not yet operating at full capacity. The first phase is opening in stages, and the architecture is large enough to matter even before the master plan finishes.

Development Road. The corridor that connects Faw to Europe. A quadrilateral memorandum of understanding was signed in April 2024 between Iraq, Turkey, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The route runs 1,200 kilometres through Basra, Baghdad, Mosul, and into Turkey, then onward to Mersin port and the rest of Europe. Total project value sits at $17 billion. Oliver Wyman holds the economic-model consulting contract signed July 2024. Turkey has finalised the $17 billion financing framework, with groundbreaking sequenced after the Iraqi elections. The TIR international road transport system went operational in Iraq in March 2025. A high-speed rail design was announced in September 2025, with phase 1 connecting Basra to Baghdad by 2031.

This infrastructure produces revenue independent of oil. Container fees, transit fees, rail freight, telecommunications corridor leases. Asia-to-Europe overland routing through Iraq becomes a federal budget line that does not depend on what oil does on any given day. A diversified revenue base is the precondition for a currency rate that does not collapse on a single sector shock.

The Iraq Hydrocarbon Law (HCL)

A federal Hydrocarbon Law has been pending in Iraq since 2007. 18 years of political deadlock between Baghdad, Erbil, and the major sectarian blocs. Most readers have heard the bill is stalled. The current state is more interesting than the headline.

Two court rulings cleared the legal scaffolding in 2025. In January 2025 the Karkh Court in Baghdad overturned earlier anti-KRG rulings. In July 2025 the Federal Supreme Court dismissed lawsuits against KRG gas contracts with HKN Energy and Western Zagros. The legal challenges that had blocked federal-KRG harmonisation for 15 years no longer carry the force they did.

The profit-share gap remains the substantive disagreement. Federal licensing rounds yield 96.5% revenue to the Iraqi state. KRG-signed contracts yield 80%. The federal contracts are service contracts (operator paid a fixed fee per barrel, state retains the rest). KRG contracts run closer to production-sharing agreements (operator recovers cost plus a share of profit before state take). The draft HCL modifications introduced by the KRG seek to standardise contractor cost recovery and profit share from gross income before deductions.

The court system has cleared the constitutional objections. Once the cabinet stabilises after the post-election seating completes (the watch list in Iraq's Comprehensive Reform), an HCL signature becomes a single chamber vote, not a 18-year long impossibility.

ASYCUDA and the cash kill

This is the section most existing Iraqi dinar coverage skips. It is also the lever everyone asking the revaluation question should be tracking.

Iraq's customs system is mid-rollout on the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development's ASYCUDA World platform. UNCTAD is the implementing agency. The total budget across 3 phases is approximately $13.8 million, funded by the Iraqi Ministry of Finance.

Phase 2 reached more than 60% completion by the end of September 2025 and closes on June 24, 2026 — 5 weeks away. All 22 federal border crossings are now covered, from Basra International Airport and Umm Qasr in the south to Trebil with Jordan, Al-Qaim with Syria, and Mandali with Iran. Paper-to-electronic declaration became effective January 1, 2025. Pre-arrival declaration began December 1, 2025. The KRG-federal tariff unification deadline was January 1, 2026, with a final ASYCUDA agreement signed in April 2026 after months of disputes.

Parallel to ASYCUDA, the Central Bank of Iraq has issued Electronic Payment Services Regulation Number 2 of 2024, which took full effect in 2025. All government payments are required to move to electronic channels by July 2026 — within 6 to 8 weeks. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, Rafidain Bank settled 2.65 trillion dinars (~$2 billion) through electronic channels, a 244% year-on-year increase. The CBI is in the research and development phase for a central bank digital currency, announced by PM advisor Mazhar Mohammed Saleh in March 2025.

A currency cannot be cleanly revalued if a significant percentage of its circulating stock moves through unmonitored cash channels. The float is unknown. The reserve-backing math is unknown. Any revaluation announcement triggers cash hoarding and parallel-market spikes that fight the official rate. We covered the cash-versus-formal-economy lever in The Snake Inside the Ministry.

ASYCUDA closes the border-side leakage. Every import and export is logged at the customs layer, every dinar tied to a declared trade flow. The electronic payments mandate closes the domestic leakage. Every government wage, every supplier payment, every tax flow runs through traceable bank rails. Once both systems operate in parallel, the CBI can quantify the true circulating float and match it against reserves.

The parallel market collapses toward the official rate not because the CBI commands it, but because the unmonitored channel narrows until it cannot move enough dollar volume to set a meaningful premium.

The Iraqi dinar exchange rate math against 1,310

The 2026 federal budget sets the official Iraqi dinar exchange rate at 1,300 IQD per USD. The Central Bank of Iraq buys dollars from the Ministry of Finance at 1,300, sells to local banks at 1,310, and the banks distribute to the public at approximately 1,320. The parallel market sits between 1,540 and 1,560 per dollar, a premium of around 18%. The gap is narrowing.

The reserve backing under the rate: $97.5 billion in foreign reserves plus 162.7 tonnes of gold. The circulating money supply is about to become fully measurable for the first time in Iraq's modern monetary history once ASYCUDA and electronic payment rails are operating in parallel.

When the CBI announced the move from 1,460 to 1,300 on February 7, 2023, it executed overnight on a single announcement. The mechanical capacity to reprice exists. What has been missing is the architectural readiness to do it without losing control of the parallel market response.

That architectural readiness is what 2025 and 2026 built.

Why external capex is the strongest validator

Sovereign rhetoric is cheap. Capital expenditure is what gets validated.

• $27 billion from TotalEnergies and QatarEnergy
• $2.7 billion from Daewoo on Al Faw
• $17 billion in finalised financing for the Development Road
• $1.1 billion from Pearl Petroleum on the Khor Mor KM250 expansion
• Schlumberger on Akkas
• Chinese state firms across Mansuriya, Rumaila, West Qurna 1, Al-Ahdab, Halfaya

These are not aid programmes. Every contract above has a project finance model behind it that prices in Iraq's future cash flow profile, currency stability, and counterparty risk. Capital allocation committees at TotalEnergies, BP, Daewoo, Pearl, Sinopec, PetroChina, and Schlumberger have all approved multi-decade exposure to the Iraqi sovereign and the Iraqi banking system.

Companies that are paid to be right about future cash flows in resource economies have already voted with their balance sheets.

Case studies: Norway, Saudi Arabia, Alaska, Botswana

The structure Iraq is building has running comparables.

Norway — Government Pension Fund Global. Established in 1990 to capture surplus petroleum revenue. ~$2 trillion AUM as of May 2026, the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. Norway operates a 4% rule allowing the government to draw 4% of fund assets each year into the fiscal budget. No direct annual dividend to citizens. The model prioritises intergenerational wealth and long-term institutional investment.

Saudi Arabia — Vision 2030 and the Public Investment Fund. PIF grew through the partial Aramco IPO and now holds over $1 trillion in assets. More than 60% of PIF investment is concentrated in giga-projects (NEOM, Qiddiya, the Red Sea Project). The stated aim is to lower citizen dependency on public spending by expanding private-sector employment, in a population where 35% is under the age of 25. Vision 2030 reinvests sovereign wealth into industrial transformation rather than distributing it.

Alaska — Permanent Fund. Distributes an annual cash dividend to every resident funded by petroleum revenues. Direct, transparent, politically durable. The fund itself is much smaller than Norway's or Saudi Arabia's, but the per-capita payout shows up in the household.

Botswana — Pula Fund. Cited in sovereign wealth governance literature for transparency and disciplined fiscal-rule architecture, even though its asset base is modest.

Iraq sits closer to the Saudi PIF model than the Norwegian one. The population is young. Employment need is acute. The political economy rewards visible reinvestment over the patient compounding logic that Norway maintains. Once the HCL signature locks the disbursement framework, that framework is the choice between these models.

The country-by-country analysis sits in the Scenario Research Reports Series 1, including the IR-008 Turkey and IR-009 El Salvador case studies on de-dollarisation, sanctions stress, and managed currency moves.

How citizens benefit from an Iraqi dinar revaluation

The whole conversation is meaningless if the disbursement model does not land at the citizen layer.

A revaluation directly raises the purchasing power of every Iraqi household that holds dinars or earns wages in dinars. Imports become cheaper. International medical care and education become accessible. Remittance corridors invert.

The electronic payments mandate already changes the employment picture. Civil service salaries are being moved onto traceable rails. The deposit is visible, the wage is auditable, and the corruption skim that used to operate in the cash gap between treasury issuance and employee receipt narrows. Foreign capital expenditure creates direct employment. The TotalEnergies project alone generates contractor and operational hiring across the Basra region. Daewoo, Sinopec, Pearl Petroleum, and Schlumberger each carry local-hiring obligations.

The HCL profit share, once signed, decides whether resource revenue is captured at the federal layer, the regional layer, or distributed per capita. None of the major comparable models hand the entire upside to citizens directly. Norway compounds it. Saudi Arabia reinvests it. Alaska distributes a fraction. Iraq's draft will land somewhere in that range.

Iraq has the wealth. The disbursement model is the remaining decision.

Two redemption paths: domestic CBI and international Tier 1

Citizen benefit is one layer of the disbursement question. The other is access — how the holders who built positions before the announcement actually convert into the post-revaluation rate. Iraqi citizens and international holders sit on two different paths.

Domestic | CBI and authorised Iraqi banks. Iraqi citizens and residents convert through the Central Bank of Iraq window and the network of CBI-authorised commercial banks. CBI Governor Ali al-Alaq told the Sin Dialogue Forum in May 2026 that cash imports of US dollars into Iraq have been cut from $14 billion to $4 billion, with roughly 95% of dollar sales now moving through the electronic platform rather than the cash currency-auction window that existed a year earlier.

We covered the plumbing read in The Quiet Work and the CBI extraordinary-session signal in The Quiet Path. The domestic channel is being rebuilt into an electronic, auditable rail before the rate event lands. That is the same architecture being built to make sure citizen wages, pensions, and household balances clear through visible accounts.

International | IMF-recognised Tier 1 banks, off the cash exchange counter. Holders outside Iraq do not redeem through an exchange shop, a street kiosk, or a back-channel broker. The clean path runs through a Tier 1 international bank with IMF correspondent standing, opened as a relationship before the rate event, with the holding declared at deposit. The mechanics, the conversation with the branch manager, the two-bank method, and the documentation each holder needs to have on file are the contents of The Quiet Conversion — the redemption playbook we publish to anyone with a free Reset Intelligence account.

The reason the playbook exists is the same reason ASYCUDA and the electronic-payment mandate exist on the Iraq side. The clean channel narrows over time. The unclean channel gets more visible to every counterparty involved. Holders who have not set the architecture up before the announcement land in a much slower, much less favourable queue afterwards.

The international Tier 1 path is also the part of the Iraq model that ports cleanly to the other resource economies covered next. Any country running an extractive-revenue plus customs-digitisation plus IMF-correspondent-bank stack inherits the same two-channel redemption structure.

Open The Quiet Conversion in your free Resources library Or skip straight to Direct Access if your situation is specific enough that you want me to walk it with you directly.

Other countries that could replicate the Iraq model

The Iraq architecture is replicable. The components are signed contracts plus customs digitisation plus central bank reserve build plus profit share legislation. Any state with extractive resources and political will can clone it.

Venezuela holds the world's largest proved oil reserves and a structural recovery overhang from years of sanctions and capital controls. The macro setup is comparable. The political will is the variable.

Iran post-sanctions, if and when that scenario opens, sits on a similar resource base and a more developed industrial layer than Iraq.

Nigeria, Angola, and Algeria all run resource-rich economies with various stages of customs digitisation and central bank modernisation already underway. ASYCUDA is operational in multiple African economies. The framework transfers.

Iraq adds one feature to the literature that the others do not yet match: the speed at which the architecture can be built once political alignment lands. 17 years of HCL deadlock dissolves in 2 Supreme Court rulings. 5 years of ASYCUDA rollout reaches all 22 border crossings. Decades of cash-economy patronage gets squeezed by an electronic-payments mandate dated July 2026.

The Read

If you came here from a guru group expecting another date, you will not find one. Iraq does not publish revaluation announcements prior to an event. The CBI does not telegraph rate moves. No Iraqi institution is going to post a calendar on social media for you to follow.

That is the whole reason this briefing exists.

The dates you have been promised have come and gone. The promises in the chat rooms about "next Friday" and "after Eid" and "before the budget" have been wrong every single cycle. That is not because the move is fake. It is because the people promising it have no inside line and never did. The move arrives the same way Iraq's last 3 monetary moves arrived. Overnight. On a single CBI statement. With the architecture quietly finished underneath. And the architecture completing is the part you can verify yourself.

Yesterday we laid out the watch list in Iraq's Comprehensive Reform. al-Sari's opening letter to the IMF. The 2026 budget package tabled in parliament. The 2026 Article IV mission landing on the calendar. The post-Eid chamber session that seats Interior and Defence. A federal Oil and Gas Law tabled for its 167-vote confirmation. Each one is a Finance signature event or a consequence of one. None of these are predictions. They are calendar items with named actors and named institutions.

This is not a 12-month thesis. This is a chain of dated events that have already started landing. ASYCUDA Phase 2 closes June 24. All government payments move electronic by July. The KRG-federal customs unification was signed in April. The TotalEnergies $27 billion project is in early production now. The Khor Mor expansion completed 8 months ahead of schedule. The Federal Supreme Court cleared the legal scaffolding on KRG gas contracts last July.

Trump told us in January 2020 that the US holds $35 billion of Iraqi money and expected Iraq to agree to pay. The architecture being built right now is the mechanism by which Iraq becomes a country wealthy enough, transparent enough, and bankable enough to make that arithmetic work without a sovereign default. The interests are aligned at the highest political layer.

When Iraq moves with the conditions aligned, it moves fast. The cabinet vote that ended 5 months of deadlock cleared 14 ministers in a single chamber session once the sanctions calendar broke the hold. See Fourteen Ministers in Baghdad and The Planned Collapse for the build-up.

The architecture underneath the announcement is being built in public. The contracts are signed. The customs rails are closing. The court rulings have cleared. The Finance chair is held by a Hikma nominee. Not from the political machine that has controlled cabinet seats and ministry contracts in Iraq since 2005.

So you have a choice.

You can stay on the guru rollercoaster of missed dates, last-minute intel drops, and recycled rumours. You will be wrong on the date again, because the people calling the date have been wrong every cycle and they have no inside line to be right next time either.

Or you can follow the verified evidence chain. Signed contracts you can pull from corporate press releases. Customs deadlines you can pull from the UNCTAD ASYCUDA programme page. Court rulings you can pull from public Iraqi court records. CBI gold reserve figures you can pull from World Bank data. Every claim in this briefing has a source link at the bottom. None of them require trust. All of them require patience.

Being prepared when the event lands is not about holding a position. It is about the relationship. International holders convert through a Tier 1 bank with IMF correspondent standing, opened as a relationship before the rate event, with the holding declared at deposit. The Quiet Conversion is the playbook for that relationship. Free with a Reset Intelligence account.

The remaining question is whether you spent the months before the announcement preparing for it, or whether you queue for it afterwards alongside everyone who waited for permission to act.

What you do with the exposure question is your call. What we deliver is the architecture, the dates, the receipts, and the order of operations. Positioning is a conversation, not just a transaction.

Frequently asked

Will the Iraqi dinar revalue in 2026?
The Central Bank of Iraq has set the 2026 budget rate at 1,300 IQD per USD and stated it has no plan for a sudden revaluation in the 2026 budget. The CBI will not announce a revaluation publicly. That is what this research is for.
What the CBI is doing is building the architecture (ASYCUDA, electronic payments, gold reserve accumulation, signed energy contracts) that makes a managed revaluation possible without losing control of the parallel market. The signature event is gated on cabinet stabilisation and an HCL vote, not on a calendar promise.

What is the current Iraqi dinar exchange rate?
The official 2026 budget rate is 1,300 IQD per USD. The CBI sells to banks at 1,310 and the public buys at approximately 1,320. The parallel market sits at roughly 1,540 to 1,560, a premium of around 18%.

How much oil does Iraq have?
145 billion barrels of proved reserves, 5th largest globally, plus an additional 8.8 billion barrel discovery announced in Najaf in May 2026.

What is ASYCUDA?
ASYCUDA World is the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development's customs management platform. Iraq is mid-rollout, with Phase 2 closing June 24, 2026. The system covers all 22 federal border crossings and electronic declaration is mandatory.

What is the Iraqi Hydrocarbon Law?
A federal oil and gas law pending in Iraq since 2007. Two 2025 Supreme Court rulings cleared the constitutional objections that had blocked it. Federal licensing rounds currently yield 96.5% revenue to the state. KRG contracts yield 80%. The signed HCL will harmonise the profit-share framework.

Sources and References

• Iraq $16 trillion mineral wealth, PM advisor Mazhar Mohammed Saleh 2025 — Channel 8 | Iraqi News | Iraqi News Agency
• Iraq oil reserves 145 billion barrels — US EIA Iraq country brief | EIA Iraq overview
• Iraq Najaf 8.8 billion barrel oil discovery May 2026 — Euronews
• Iraq phosphate reserves Akashat — Iraqi Bulletin of Geology and Mining | Mindat Akashat
• CBI gold reserves 162.7 tonnes February 2025 — Iraqi News | World Bank reserves data
• TotalEnergies GGIP $27 billion signed August 2023 — TotalEnergies press | Argus Media | Iraqi News | KBR engineering
• West Qurna 1 PetroChina handover November 2023 — Oil and Gas Middle East | West Qurna Field Wikipedia
• Khor Mor KM250 completion and 825 MMscf/d target — OilPrice | Oil and Gas Advancement
• Akkas field Schlumberger contract — Oil and Gas Middle East | Iraqi News
• Mansuriya field Jereh and Petro-Iraq award — Iran Oil Gas | Channel 8
• Al Faw Grand Port 99-berth master plan, first 5 container berths opened, Daewoo $2.7 billion contract, 2028 phase 1 completion — Iraqi News first 5 berths | Grand Faw Port Wikipedia | Al Faw Grand Port official | AGBI port progress | Maritime Executive | The B1M $17BN Plan video
• Development Road $17 billion quadrilateral MOU April 2024 — Iraq Europe Development Road Wikipedia | Middle East Council on Global Affairs | Türkiye Today financing | Railway Technology
• Iraq Hydrocarbon Law draft and 2025 court rulings — Kurdish Globe HCL bridge | Rigzone amended draft | Arab Weekly | Iraq Oil Forum
• ASYCUDA Iraq deployment Phase 2 — Iraq Ministry of Finance ASYCUDA | Shafaq News | Rudaw Erbil Baghdad deal | Kurdistan24 unified customs | Draw Media
• CBI electronic payments mandate July 2026 — Iraq Business News digital payments | Global Business Outlook digital dinar | Central Banking CBDC | The National FinTech
• 2026 Iraqi dinar exchange rate official versus parallel — EBC Financial Group | US First Exchange | Iraqi News May 2026 update | Rawabt Center parallel market
• Norway Government Pension Fund Global $2 trillion AUM — NBIM | Fortune coverage | IMF Beyond the Curse | Wikipedia Norway Pension Fund
• Saudi Vision 2030 and PIF — Vision 2030 Wikipedia | PIF official | Brookings Aramco IPO | Carnegie Endowment
• Internal callbacks — Iraq's Comprehensive Reform | Bessent Signs the Sixth | Fourteen Ministers in Baghdad | The Pittance and the Pen | The Planned Collapse | The Snake Inside the Ministry | Resources Library | Head of the Snake | Chapter 1 free | Audiobook
• Book — Head of the Snake by David E Atterton