A large onshore oil drilling rig operates in Iraq, reflecting the importance of fields such as West Qurna 2, where sanctions, ownership shifts, and geopolitical competition are reshaping control over energy assets. (Shutterstock/Bertrand Godfroid)

How America Can Leverage Iraq’s West Qurna Oil Field 

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Sanctions did more than punish Russia—they reshaped control of a key oil field in Iraq.

While energy analytics have focused on Washington’s campaigns in Venezuela and Iran, a no less significant development for the energy sector occurred in southern Iraq. By late autumn 2025 American sanctions pressure on Russia’s largest private oil firm—Lukoil—led to the firm declaring force majeure, leading to Iraq nationalizing operations at the firm’s flagship oil project with intent to sell, which could have far reaching repercussions for the energy sector beyond this one field, and act as a litmus test for a shift in US overseas energy policy.

For context, West Qurna 2 produces around 470,000 oil barrels daily—about 0.5 percent of world oil production and about 9 percent of Iraq’s total. The broader West Qurna complex, which said field is a part of, contains 43 billion barrelsof recoverable reserves, thus belonging to the top five largest oil fields in the world.

In November 2025, Lukoil announced force majeure at West Qurna 2 after US-led sanctions over Russia’s war in Ukraineimpaired its ability to fulfill operational and financial tasks, causing Iraq to partially cease its transactions with Lukoil due to the rise of compliance risks.

Furthermore, due to the importance of this field, in January 2026, Iraq’s cabinet of ministers nationalized operations per the terms of the Technical Service Agreement (TSA) with Lukoil—a move that has been interpreted as an attempt to maintain a stable output, with a stated intent to sell the field to a firm better able to meet its responsibilities under the TSA within a time period of 12 months.

But how did we get here, and why does this field matter on a geopolitical as well as a commercial level?

Cold War Data Advantage: Soviet Geological Intelligence and Lukoil’s Entry into Iraq

The founder of Lukoil—Vagit Alekperov—served as deputy oil and gas minister in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1990, which gave him access to Moscow’s geological survey data on Iraqi reserves gained during the Cold War. This institutional knowledge on the reservoirs and about Baghdad’s unique political economy gained through his work in the similarly labyrinthine Soviet bureaucracy, as well as his Azerbaijani heritage—gave Lukoil a competitive advantage when entering Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in March 1997, giving the firm access to a Production........

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