Kurdish oil smuggling to Iran flourishes

I was right in the middle of that place, several times. Kirkuk

Kurdistan regional government (KRG) and Bagdad government had disputes regarding the distribution of the revenue from selling oil. It seems KRG fed up with the Bagdad and doing it's own trade with neighbouring countries directly with the means available to it. Calling it smuggling shows this was written with Arab nationalism and propaganda in mind. I can't believe JT fell for this.

Well, the trade very much fits the classic description of smuggling. The KRG used to have control of a pipeline to Turkey and the Turks were paying the KRG to ship oil to them through that pipeline. But the Iraqi gov shut that route down claiming only they could export the nation's oil. So now unnamed middlemen with political connections and cover buy the oil from legitimate oil producers and sell it to who knows who. The KRG claims to not be involved and claims to receive no tax revenue from the sale of the oil. The KRG lost a huge source of revenue when the Iraqi central government shut that pipeline down. The KRG is apparently not involved on an official level (which is not to say members of the KRG are not taking a cut of the profits to look the other way, as are Iraqi central government figures). It is a commodity trade conducted outside of official government channels and outside of the nations laws. That pretty much qualifies it as smuggling.

What is ironic is that you have a Shiite controlled Iraqi central government populated by officials who often take their direction from Tehran shutting off the above board sale oil from Kurdistan while Tehran not just looks the other way but seems to encourage the Kurds to ship their oil through Iran to get it to other markets. It strikes me as a convenient means for the Shiites to take a cut of that trade one way or the other. If not through the pipeline then they take their cut through the bribes necessary to move the oil from Kirkuk through Iran and abroad. The Kurds pay one way or the other. And the Turks are more than happy to deal with the Kurds for oil while simultaneously attacking them in northern Iraq and throughout Turkey. Everyone craps on the Kurds.