Khor Mor Gas Field Drone Attack: Why Kurdistan Lost Power

An explosive-laden drone has struck the Khor Mor gas field in the Chamchamal district of Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, setting its liquefied petroleum gas facilities alight and halting production at the complex that feeds most of the region’s power stations. The Kurdistan Regional Government’s natural resources and electricity ministries described the strike, which hit at around 11 p.m. local time on November 8, as a terrorist attack. The operator, Dana Gas, confirmed on November 9 that the fire had been put out but that production remained suspended pending an assessment of the damage. Ministry of Electricity spokesman Omed Ahmed put the capacity lost at between 2,500 and 2,800 megawatts, with regional output falling from over 3,700 megawatts to around 1,000. One night’s attack on one facility has thus removed close to three quarters of the region’s electricity.

No group has claimed responsibility, although Iraqi security sources indicated that the drone approached from the direction of Tuz Khurmatu in Saladin province, outside the Kurdistan Region’s control, and Kurdish authorities have blamed Iran-aligned Iraqi armed groups for earlier attacks on the region’s energy sites. Iraqi Prime Minister Ali Falih al-Zaidi ordered a joint investigation with the region’s authorities, stating that an initial assessment had found no casualties. The strike is far from the first on a field that has produced gas since October 2008: a drone attack in April 2024 killed four foreign workers, and on November 26, 2025 two drones hit its storage tanks and forced a shutdown that brought power cuts across the region. Baghdad then ordered the federal Ministry of Defence to give the field air defence cover in coordination with Erbil, an order whose results the latest strike now calls into question.

The attack comes as the war with Iran that began in late February continues to spill across the region, with the Kurdistan Region having been a frequent target of drones and missiles launched by Iran or allied Iraqi armed groups, mostly against oil fields. Khor Mor is run by Dana Gas for the Pearl Petroleum consortium, in which Dana Gas and its affiliate Crescent Petroleum are among the partners. Because it supplies domestic power rather than exports, its loss is felt by the population far more immediately than that of an oil field. Cheap drones aimed at energy sites have become a defining weapon of 2026, from Ukraine’s raids on Russian refineries to the drone strikes on power stations in Sudan, and Iraq has so far shown little ability to stop them over its own territory.

The electricity ministry stated that it would keep hospitals and water treatment plants running from the Dukan and Darbandikhan hydroelectric dams and dual-fuel stations, with supply projected at five to six hours a day depending on location. Omed Ahmed said: “The full normalization of the situation depends entirely on the resumption of gas supplies.” Dana Gas gave no timetable for a restart in its disclosure to the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange. After the November 2025 strike the company restored normal output within a week, with engineers having estimated that repairing the damaged tanks would take two to three days.