BASRA, Sept 22 — In the Iraqi oil hub of Basra, maintenance contractor Fawzi spends his days cooling his heels waiting for work that seldom comes, as the Middle East war puts a serious crimp on the once-bustling port town. Basra has long been a key cog in Iraq’s economy but, after months of Iran choking off Gulf oil exports with its blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, the city is suffering. Fuel trucks stand idle and workers face pay cuts and lay-offs. “I haven’t done anything in a month,” Fawzi told AFP. “What are we supposed to maintain?” Many Basra residents have lost their jobs or taken heavy pay cuts as private contractors, as oil fields and the Umm Qasr cargo port scale back operations. Crude oil exports account for almost 90 per cent of Iraq’s foreign revenue, and are primarily shipped through Hormuz via the cluster of facilities around Basra, the country’s only gateway to the Gulf. The war has cruelly exposed Iraq’s dependence on oil, and its main export route, dealing a setback to its economic recovery after decades of conflict. Fawzi said his company first slashed salaries by 20 per cent, then by half, before laying off dozens of employees. He now reports for duty just 15 days a month. Basra’s parking areas overflow with oil trucks. Some linger empty, while others wait for weeks with full tanks to load their crude onto ships. Cheap oil Before the war started at the end of February, Iraq produced around four million barrels of crude per day and exported an average of 3.4 million, mostly via Hormuz. But when Iran blockaded Hormuz, onshore storage quickly filled up, forcing Iraq to slash production. Experts have long warned Iraq to introduce different income streams to cushion swings in the energy market. But with a fledgling private sector, poor banking system and dilapidated infrastructure, diversification is difficult. Iraq has sought to calm fears by using alternative routes, including trucks through Syria and a pipeline to Turkey, but they can handle only a fraction of the sea-bound trade. After a sharp drop, Iraqi oil exports through Hormuz came climbing back in the first week of September, data from the maritime tracking firm Kpler showed. However, Iraq sold the oil at “discounted prices”, a government official said. According to authorities, Iraq exported an average of 2.6 million bpd so far in September. Iran had announced a special exemption for Iraqi tankers in late August, while the US says it has recently managed to boost Gulf exports through a secure Hormuz corridor hugging the Omani coast. Nonetheless, the economic fallout is evident. Prices have surged and the Iraqi dinar has fluctuated. Foreign currency reserves fell by $20 billion, according to the government official. Iraq relies heavily on foreign currency from oil sales to pay civil servants, finance imports and stabilise the dinar. The collapse in these revenues forced authorities to borrow internally. While the government hopes it can continue borrowing for months, “it’s probably banking on a resolution to the conflict before the end of this year”, economic expert Ali al-Mawlawi said. The recent partial recovery in oil exports bought the government “a little more time”, and allowed it to pay salaries with minor delays. “The imperative is to ensure that it can continue” to do so, Mawlawi warned. Empty wharves Iraq imports most of its goods, from food and medicine to electronics and natural gas. But Umm Qasr, the major southern port, now stands nearly deserted. Only a few vessels are docked in its northern section, including an Iranian-flagged cargo ship, and a vessel that port employees said had passed through Hormuz from China. Three newly built wharves are vacant, their cranes and walkways empty. The downturn has hit hard. State port workers lost their monthly incentives, which are linked to the port’s profits and had supplemented their pay. The head of the port’s northern sector, Captain Salem Hussein, said “if ships don’t come... companies cannot maintain the same workforce”. “Real work resumes only when Hormuz reopens,” he added. The disruption has rippled through the local economy. Basra electronics vendor Zaid Hadi, 36, said sales had halved, blaming higher import costs, salary cuts, job losses and the exodus of foreign oil-sector workers. Customers “now hesitate to spend... worried about possible salary delays” and fearing harder times ahead, he said. Amir, 35, worked for a private contractor at an oil field that he said took drastic action, including slashing salaries by 40 per cent. “In Basra, we depend on the port and the oil, and now both have come to a halt,” Amir said. — AFP
BASRA, Sept 22 — In the Iraqi oil hub of Basra, maintenance contractor Fawzi spends his days cooling his heels waiting for work that seldom comes, as the Middle East war puts a serious crimp on the once-bustling port town. Basra has long been a key cog in Iraq’s economy but, afte…
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Iranian aviation authorities are currently in negotiations with Oman and Iraq regarding carrier operations, occurring seven months after the start of the conflict. Concurrently, U.S. official Scott Bessent has reportedly focused on these same carriers, though the specific nature and outcome of his actions remain unverified.
The US and Iran hold talks on UNGA’s first day, despite Trump threatening to ‘annihilate’ Iran in his opening address.
Iranian officials held three hours of talks with US special envoy Steve Witkoff on the sidelines of the UN general assembly, Donald Trump disclosed on Tuesday. He said there would a further meeting in the very near future. Witkoff said he felt very good about the meeting, the first such contact since the US vice-president, JD Vance, met an Iranian delegation to agree a memorandum of understanding in Switzerland in June.
Iranian officials confirmed the meeting with Witkoff involved its foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, and was mediated by diplomats from Qatar. A senior Iranian official also indicated that the country was prepared to reopen the strait of Hormuz within a week, so long as the US took reciprocal steps to ease the military and economic pressure it is applying on Iran.
Previously, Iran had set seven onerous preconditions for lifting its blockade on the strait, one of the world’s key oil shipping routes, including an end to the US war “on all fronts” and a commitment by the US to end all aggressive actions against Iran, including sanctions.
The new position, revealed amid frantic backstage negotiations at the UN general assembly in New York and set out by an Iranian official in Tehran to the Japanese news agency Kyodo and then to Reuters, would involve relaxing some of those preconditions.
The official claimed the position had been approved by Iran’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, and the country’s supreme national security council, although some Iranian media close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) denied any new position had been adopted, reflecting disputes in Tehran.
Diplomats had been testing the ground for possible talks between the US and Iran, with Qatar’s diplomats in talks with Araghchi. A meeting between Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, and Trump had largely been ruled out as too combustible, however.
Pezeshkian is due on Wednesday to address the UN general assembly, where most of the Iranian delegation left the hall during Trump’s speech on Tuesday after he described Iran as the bully of the Middle East and the number one terror organisation on Earth.
But earlier, the IRGC issued a statement that said there was no contradiction between staging negotiations and waging war at the same time, a position echoed by Iran’s chief negotiator, Mohammad Ghalibaf, in recent remarks delivered online to the Iranian parliament.
The official said Iran was seeking signs from Washington that it was prepared to return to negotiations and take steps toward ending its military blockade of Iranian ports and halting military operations related to the strait of Hormuz. In that case Iran was prepared to reopen the strategic waterway within seven days and return to the negotiating table, according to the official.
Such preconditions are less stringent than those issued by other senior Iranian figures in the previous 48 hours. Experience has shown that initially appealing Iranian offers can emerge to be more complex once the small print is revealed, and there is a hardly disguised tussle being played out in Tehran between hardliners and figures like Pezeshkian over the value of any talks.
Resolving these disputes is not made easier by the low profile kept by the Supreme Leader, normally the arbiter in such internal ructions. Trump, in his remarks to the general assembly, said he had a big decision to make: whether to annihilate Iran, or to help it become a great country.
“Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?” he asked, adding he expected Iran to make a deal immediately after the US midterm elections. Overall, his demeanour, and the mixed signals out of Tehran, suggest the two sides are still too far apart to reach a deal, which would have to start with agreement between Iran and Oman on a new route for commercial shipping in the strait of Hormuz that largely goes through Iranian waters.
The Gulf states have not endorsed such a deal. Saudi Arabia also wanted to be a signatory and authoriser of the route, but Iran insisted it had to be endorsed only by the two countries in which the strait’s waterways pass – Iran and Oman. Tehran is also under growing pressure as the US blockade of its oil exports plays havoc with its currency reserves and domestic inflation.
In his speech, Trump called on other countries to isolate Iran economically, including by demanding that all nations prevent any Iranian civilian planes from landing at their airports. US diplomats have warned Turkey and Iraq to comply or face sanctions.
Many of the Gulf states were also planning to urge Trump to do more to press Israel to meet its commitments under the peace plan to withdraw from Gaza. The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, prompted a walk-out by the Israeli delegation when he described Gaza as “the world’s largest graveyard and the most inhumane and shameful concentration camp of our time”.
He added: “Israel refuses to stop the occupation. We are faced with a genocidal mindset that can never get enough of killing. No one with a sense of humanity, mercy, or compassion, no one guided by justice and conscience can possibly remain indifferent to this picture.
” Jordan’s King Abdullah, in his address, claimed: “With Israel, resolutions end where they began on paper. This result is a state without restraint. This government’s sense of impunity has reached terrifying levels. It no longer feels compelled to ask: ‘Can we get away with this?
’ It already knows the answer.” He added that what was unfolding across the occupied West Bank was not a series of isolated acts but rather “elements of a single policy to compel an entire population to leave their land. And there is a name for that: forced displacement.
And that is a war crime.” A statement from eight Gulf foreign ministers also called on Israel to immediately fulfil its outstanding commitments under the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire agreement, including by ensuring the immediate, safe and unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance and early recovery supplies, and facilitating the rehabilitation of critical infrastructure.
The ministers reiterated their categorical rejection of any measures aimed at the expulsion or the forced displacement of the Palestinian people from their homeland or attempts to alter the territorial or demographic character of the occupied Palestinian territory.
Sheikh Tamim has attributed the conflict between the US, Israel, and Iran to years of stalled diplomatic efforts. This characterization remains an unverified political assertion rather than a confirmed causal fact.