Drone attack cuts power to 70% of Iraq's Kurdish region

A drone struck the Khor Mor gas storage facility in Iraq's Sulaimani governorate on Sunday night, triggering a fire that knocked between 2,500 and 2,800 megawatts of electricity generation off the grid and left more than 70 percent of the Kurdish region without power.

Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi reported no casualties in an initial assessment and directed a joint investigative committee to investigate the strike. Kurdistan Regional Government electricity spokesperson Omid Ahmed confirmed the attack suspended gas supply to power plants serving Erbil, Sulaimaniyah, Bazian, Chamchamal and Duhok. Critical facilities including hospitals and water treatment plants are being supplied through hydroelectric stations and alternative-fuel plants.

No group has claimed responsibility. Officials have not confirmed whether the attack is connected to the broader US-Israel conflict with Iran, though a drone struck the same facility in 2025 under similarly unclaimed circumstances.

Khor Mor is operated by Dana Gas and Pearl Petroleum. Any prolonged outage at a facility of this scale, in a region already managing energy shortfalls, will put further pressure on Kurdish energy infrastructure that has no rapid substitute for lost gas supply.

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Eleanor Ashworth

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Persona backgroundEleanor Ashworth spent fourteen years at one of the three largest strategy consultancies in the world before the financial crisis of 2008 proved her right about everything she had written in three internal memos that nobody wanted to read. She was not one of the people who was wrong.