- Iraq’s political situation is growing increasingly unstable after violent protests broke out this week, threatening Iraq’s oil fields
- Iraq is the world’s third largest oil producer, so disruptions in Iraqi oil supply could cause energy prices to skyrocket globally.
- “I think ‘evolving’ instability in [Iraq]… will inject greater, more twisted levels of uncertainty into the global economy as the world gets into the first ‘winter’ of Russia’s unacceptable invasion of Ukraine, becoming more than an added distraction point,” Heritage Institute research fellow Anthony Kim told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Deepening political instability in Iraq may get worse, upending already tight global oil markets and pushing prices up at the pump for U.S. consumers, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Iraqi supporters of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr stormed the cabinet headquarters, forcing the interim government to shut down and sparking violent clashes with opposing pro-Iran militias and Iraqi security forces Monday and Tuesday. Violence also reached the oil-rich areas of Iraq, which if intensified could disrupt production and send oil prices in the U.S. and elsewhere shooting up, experts in geopolitics and commodities told the DCNF.
