Drone strike darkens much of Kurdistan

A drone attack on the Khor Mor gasfield in northern Iraq has suspended production, caused a fire at the facility and knocked out power across much of the Kurdistan region, according to Iraqi and Kurdish officials.

The immediate human consequence was blunt. More than 70 percent of the Kurdish region lost electricity, Al Jazeera reported, citing local authorities and security sources. Omid Ahmed, spokesperson for the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Ministry of Electricity, said gas supplies to power plants in Erbil, Sulaimaniyah, Bazian, Chamchamal and Duhok were halted, the state-run Iraqi News Agency reported.

Ahmed said the strike removed between 2,500 and 2,800 megawatts of generation from the grid. Al Jazeera’s Peter Smith, citing security sources in Baghdad, reported that the hit on the gas storage facility reduced the grid’s capacity by 70 to 80 percent. In a region where electricity already shapes whether homes can cool, pump water or keep basic routines intact, that scale of loss turns an industrial site into a civilian fault line very quickly.

Officials said emergency measures were being used to protect essential services. Ahmed said the regional ministry would try to keep hospitals and water treatment plants running by switching to hydroelectric stations and plants using alternative fuel. That is a practical response, but it is not the same as restoring ordinary supply.

What remains unclear is who carried out the attack and whether it is connected to the wider regional war involving the United States, Israel and Iran. Al Jazeera said there was no immediate claim of responsibility. In conflicts like this, attribution matters because the target is not only infrastructure but public confidence: a gasfield can be repaired more easily than the assumption that basic services will hold.

Al Jazeera’s fact-checking agency, Sanad, said it verified footage showing smoke and flames rising from the area of the gasfield in Sulaimaniyah governorate.

Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi said there were no casualties in an initial assessment, according to INA, and directed the formation of a joint investigative committee with authorities in the Kurdish region. That last detail is modest but important. When the lights go out across cities, people need more than condemnation. They need to know whether the system that failed can still explain what happened.