Production at Iraq's Khor Mor gas field, one of the largest gas fields in the Kurdistan Region, was suspended on Sunday night, November 8, after a drone attack hit the field, two security sources told Reuters. Smoke was seen rising from the site in the Chamchamal district of Sulaymaniyah province, and an engineer working at the field said a gas storage facility was hit, with all crew ordered into shelters for fear of further attacks.

Source: Reuters, Nov 8, 2026

The Kurdistan Regional Government's ministries of natural resources and electricity said in a joint statement that "at 11pm, the Khor Mor gas field came under a terrorist attack", without giving further details, Agence France-Presse reported. A Kurdish security source told AFP that an explosive-laden drone struck the field, and two sources in the regional electricity ministry told Reuters the drone hit a liquefied petroleum gas storage tank and set it alight.

Source: AFP via SCMP, Nov 8, 2026

A field that feeds most of Kurdistan's electricity

Khor Mor is operated by the Pearl Petroleum consortium, which includes the United Arab Emirates-based companies Dana Gas and Crescent Petroleum, and it supplies gas to power plants that generate much of the Kurdistan Region's electricity. The shutdown cut gas supplies to five power stations, and the regional electricity ministry estimated generation would fall by about 2,500 to 2,800 megawatts — roughly two-thirds of the region's normal power output, according to summaries of the ministry's figures.

Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi said an initial assessment found no casualties in the attack, Reuters reported, and his office said early on Monday that he had ordered a joint investigation with the relevant authorities in the Kurdistan Region into the circumstances of the attack. No group had claimed responsibility, Reuters reported. A source at the field told the Iraqi outlet 964media the attack set off a fire and caused heavy damage; that damage account rests on a single field source and has not been independently confirmed.

Background: a repeatedly attacked field, in a region on edge

Khor Mor has been attacked many times in recent years, including an attack in November 2025 that also halted production. Sunday's strike came on a night of wider regional tension in the US-Israel war on Iran, which began on February 28: Iranian media reported projectile impacts on Qeshm Island the same night, and the United States has stood up Task Force Iron Gate to squeeze Iran's weapons supply routes. Nothing in the reporting reviewed for this story attributes the Khor Mor attack to any group or state: some market commentary speculated about Iran or Iran-allied Iraqi militias, but that is speculation, not evidence, and investigators have announced no finding.

For households and businesses across the Kurdistan Region — home to a large foreign workforce, including South Asian workers in energy, construction and services — the immediate impact is power: with roughly two-thirds of generation knocked out, blackouts and rationing are expected until gas flows resume. No worker casualties were reported in the initial assessment.

What happens next: the joint Baghdad-Erbil investigation will look for who launched the drone, while Pearl Petroleum and the regional authorities assess damage to the storage facility and decide when production can safely restart. After the November 2025 attack, work to restore Khor Mor's output took days; no restart timeline had been announced in the reporting reviewed for this story.