Publicly available documents regarding Iraq’s oil supplies foretold a crumbling security situation long before the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Sen. Lisa Murkowski detailed in a report released Friday.
The Islamic State, the terrorist group that controls a large swath of territory in Iraq and Syria, has made controlling oil infrastructure a central part of its expansion and financing strategy. According to public documents used in the report, officials in the United States and abroad were aware of the instability in Iraq’s oil sector for years, which Murkowski said laid a foundation for the Islamic State’s entrance — even if the disturbances weren’t directly attributable to the group itself.
“There were plenty of early warning signs that Iraq faced a deteriorating security situation years before the current collapse,” the Alaska Republican said of the report prepared by her Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee staff. “None of this is classified information and surely was being tracked by our national security folks.”
The report pools documents dating to 2011 from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which is the statistical arm of the Energy Department, as well as the Paris-based International Energy Agency and the now-defunct special inspector general for Iraq Reconstruction.
The Islamic State did not cause all the disruptions detailed in the report, Murkowski noted. Rather, the public documents highlighted in it shows that officials knew militants were fomenting instability through targeting oil resources, and that tensions among various groups were rising — a dynamic that the Islamic State has exploited.
“These public records tell a story of oil infrastructure under attack, trade routes cut off, the Kurdish Regional Government maneuvering for greater independence, and security forces incapable of performing their core mission at critical moments,” the report said.
Warning signs included an attack on the 600-mile Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline, the main artery for exporting Kurdish crude, which illuminated enhanced militant activity. And early this year, militants cut off a trucking route for oil exports into Jordan.
The report opens with the September 2013 Kurdish seizure of Kirkuk, a major oil-producing town in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region. Iraqi forces had fled their posts as the Islamic State advanced, leaving Kurdish “peshmerga” troops to fill the security gap.
“Fighting in Syria has further complicated security in these areas, rendering control of the Syria-Iraq border beyond difficult. The disorder has facilitated the cross-border movements of personnel from al Qaeda in Iraq (now called the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS) between the two countries,” SIGIR said in the Sept. 9, 2013, report to Congress.
