Northern Iraq has oil bubbling out of the ground and a Kuwaiti oil trader in Sweden knows where it’s heading
One day Samir Madani, a Kuwaiti oil trader living in Sweden, noticed something strange. He had always been captivated by oil and its influence on political relations, in peacetime and wartime, so much so that he created the website TankerTrackers.com.
Some might think that watching tankers is boring, given that they usually coast along predetermined routes. But in November 2017, Madani noticed that the oil tanker Valtamed, heading to the Suez Canal from the Turkish port of Ceyhan – which is supplied by the oil pipeline from the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq – suddenly stopped somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, off Tel Aviv but outside Israel’s territorial borders, and turned off its identification transponder. When it “resurfaced” a few days later, it was lighter, Madani realized.
Read more at www.haaretz.com
