Intelligence Report Reveals Oil Theft from Areas Under Control of Iraqi Kata'ib Hezbollah

ERBIL (Kurdistan24) - On 30 Oct. 2022 a satellite passed over the farmland of Jurf al-Sakhar, an hour's drive from the Iraqi capital, and photographed something that would stay out of public view for four years.

In a dirt yard beside a pit black with oil, 21 tanker trucks stood nose to tail. Six kilometres to the north-west, nine more were parked inside a compound that had been bare earth a year earlier. Down the road from there, builders were putting up a refinery.

Thirty tankers, three sites, one day. Each truck can carry 36,000 litres. Together that is more than a million litres of capacity, close to 6,800 barrels, waiting to move in a single afternoon.

Iraqi intelligence analysts have now pulled that image together with others taken over five years. The result is a 19-page report stamped "Top Secret" on every page, a copy of which was obtained by Kurdistan24. It concludes that oil has been drained from state pipelines in Jurf al-Sakhar since 2021 and that the operation is still running.

The file lands awkwardly for the ministry that produced it.

Two versions from one ministry

Last December the head of the Interior Ministry's Energy Police, Dhafer al-Husseini, announced that smuggling had been cut by 98 percent during 2025. On pipelines he went further, telling Iraqi media that "breaches of oil pipelines stand at zero percent," He repeated the zero figure in February for the first weeks of 2026.

The secret report was written by a different arm of the same ministry: Directorate 800 of the Agency for Intelligence and Federal Investigations. Its findings cover the same months.

It records tankers at a refinery in Jurf al-Sakhar on 30 January 2025, and 14 more at a second one that day. It records three tankers on 15 September 2025 at a site 342 metres from a buried pipeline, a location the analysts call the point of "the first pipeline breach" and "an active site during 2025 and 2026." It records more in June and July of this year.

"Oil smuggling is still continuing in Jurf al-Sakhar because the area lies under the control and protection of one of the armed factions."

That sentence is the report's entire conclusion. The Energy Police Directorate has not publicly reconciled its figures with the intelligence file.

How it grew

Read in date order, the satellite record shows an operation that started small, boomed, and then learned to hide.

2021: a pit and four trucks. The earliest image is dated 1 June 2021. It shows a hollow in the ground, stained with oil, and four tankers. The nearest pipeline is 962 metres off. By the end of November the count was seven. That same autumn, seven kilometres from the Bahbahani junction, a walled plot was being laid out. The report labels it simply "site under construction."

2022: the boom. The walled plot became what the analysts call a facility "resembling a small oil refinery," with limited capacity. Seven hundred metres away a second refinery was going up. And at the pit, traffic hit the peak captured on 30 October.

2024 to 2025: going under cover. In February 2024 a third location, closer to the pipeline, was nothing but two farmhouses with a clump of palm trees between them. By September 2025 the palms had vanished beneath a white steel roof and three tankers were waiting outside. The second refinery, now finished, had 14 tankers beside it in January 2025.

2026: still running. The most recent images are from this summer. On 4 July there were tankers at both loading points. On 30 July there were 20 at the two refineries. A second white shed had appeared at the palm-grove site.

The art of disappearing

What changes most across the five years is not the number of trucks. It is how much effort goes into not being seen.

In 2021 and 2022 the oil sat in an open pit and the tankers parked in plain view. By 2025 the loading point nearest the pipeline was under a roof. At the refineries, the report says, storage moved below ground: pits were dug and covered with a white steel frame, "instead of using oil tanks visible on the surface."

The analysts add a warning about their own numbers. Every count comes from a daytime image. The data, they write, point to loading that carries on at night, which "multiplies" the smuggling.

The checkpoint question

A tanker loaded with 36,000 litres of fuel cannot take back roads for long. The report's Geospatial Intelligence Section traced three ways to Baghdad province, and its own map shows what stands along them.

The first runs east to the Baghdad to Babil road and over the Musayyib bridge. The other two swing west into Anbar through Amiriyat al-Fallujah, where, the report notes, the trucks blend in with ordinary tankers supplying local fuel stations.

From there one route crosses the Euphrates at the Jisr al-Anaz checkpoint and meets the international highway at the al-Intisar checkpoint. The other loops through Habbaniyah and Fallujah before turning for Abu Ghraib.

Kurdistan24 counted more than a dozen named checkpoints on the map, among them al-Suqur, al-Tahaddi, al-Nasr wal-Salam, Jisr Bzaibiz and the southern entrance to Fallujah. The report draws the routes straight through several of them. It never says how the tankers get past.

On that point the report's fiercest critics and its authors end up asking the same thing. Hussein al-Kinani, head of the Al-Hadaf centre, dismissed the file on Al-Rasheed TV as a smear. But he also demanded to know why army and police checkpoints along the road had not stopped the trucks, and pointed out that hauling oil requires an Oil Ministry permit circulated to every one of them, 964media reported.

The name that is missing

For a document that reads like an indictment, the report is careful about whom it accuses.

The armed group is never identified. It appears twice, both times as "one of the armed factions." Jurf al-Sakhar until it was retaken from ISIS in 2014, has for a decade been described by Iraqi and international media as a sealed-off stronghold of the Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah, and its displaced residents have not been allowed home.

The people the report does want held to account are civil servants. Its first recommendation is legal action by the Oil Ministry against "negligent" staff in its pipelines company and its oil products distribution company, for failing to deal with the breaches "from 2021 until now."

Prosecution of those who tapped the pipelines and built the refineries comes second. Third is a technical fix: watch for pressure drops in the lines so that breaches are caught early. The cover letter, signed on 8 October by a major general who heads Directorate 800, asks that all of it be put in front of the Prime Minister.

What the file cannot prove

The report is a view from orbit, and it says so. Nobody went to the sites. The breach in the pipeline is marked "probable." The analysts admit they could not tell whether the tankers were filled with crude or with refined fuel.

There is no figure for the volume taken and no estimate of the loss beyond the phrase "grave losses." To close that gap, the authors ask the Oil Ministry for its records of abnormal pressure in the Jurf al-Sakhar pipelines, to be laid against the dates of the images. If the pressure dropped on the days the tankers gathered, the case hardens. If the ministry has no such records, that is its own answer.

A leak in the middle of a fight

The report was finished in early October. It reached the media on Monday, in the middle of a public confrontation between Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi's government and Kataib Hezbollah, and several Iraqi and Arab outlets have since published its contents.

Neither the Interior Ministry nor the Oil Ministry has said publicly whether the report is genuine, whether the Prime Minister has seen it, or whether anyone has been sent to look at four sets of coordinates that are now public.

The satellites, at least, are due another pass.

Reviewed and edited by Dr. Kamaran Aziz.