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BP, TotalEnergies and Eni have begun to evacuate staff from oilfields in Iraq amid fears that neighbouring Iran may retaliate against Israel and the US by bombing energy infrastructure in the region.
The three European oil majors have “temporarily evacuated some foreign personnel” from the south of the country, although local staff were continuing to run operations and oil production had been unaffected, Iraq’s state-run Basra Oil Company said in a statement on Monday.
The decisions follow US air strikes on Iranian nuclear sites over the weekend and mark the first confirmation of international oil companies pulling staff from the region since Israel launched its first attacks on Iran 10 days ago.
BP, which manages the giant Rumaila oilfield through a joint venture with Iraq and PetroChina, confirmed the decision, adding there was no impact on its operations. “As a precautionary measure, BP has made the decision to relocate some staff from Iraq,” it said in a statement.
Rumaila is in the oil rich south-eastern tip of Iraq, close to the city of Basra and the border with Iran.
Basra Oil Company said Eni, which is developing the nearby Zubair oil and gasfield, had reduced its presence from 260 people to 90, while Total had evacuated 60 per cent of its personnel.
The Italian oil major declined to comment on the number of people it had moved from Iraq but confirmed it had decided to reduce its presence in the country as a “precaution”. Total declined to comment.
Iran’s top military commander, Major General Abdolrahim Mousavi, on Monday said the country’s forces were entitled to retaliate against US interests, with some analysts fearing that any western operation in the region could become a target.
Iranian state news agency Tasnim said Tehran on Monday had launched missile strikes at a US air base in Qatar and a base in Iraq hosting US troops.
While Iran could launch air strikes against western energy infrastructure itself, the Islamic republic also backs several militias in Iraq that it could call on to launch attacks, said Helima Croft, a former CIA analyst who is now at RBC Capital Markets.
The militias were reluctant to come to the aid of Iran-backed former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad when his government was overthrown last year. But the Iranian leadership was likely to exert “serious pressure” on these groups to assist if it believed the survival of the regime was at stake, Croft wrote in a note. “We do see a clear and present risk of energy attacks as it is one of the remaining ways the Iranian regime can impose costs on the west,” she added.
UK oil major Shell also has personnel in southern Iraq, where its staff are seconded to the Basra Gas Company, a joint venture that captures and processes gas that was previously flared at the region’s oilfields. Shell declined to comment on the movement of any personnel.
Additional reporting by Malcolm Moore in London and Ian Johnston in Paris