[5]: 48  Germans working on the Berlin-Baghdad Railway had struck some oil prior to World War I and the wells were afterwards operated by the British military in a very limited capacity.

On March 19, 1914, at the British Foreign office, an agreement was adopted, with Gulbenkians share reduced to 5%, taken care of equally by Shell (22.5%) and APOC (47.5%), leaving 25% to Deutsche Bank.

[5]: 50  The investment decision of the British government in APOC was ratified in the House of Commons on June 17, 1914 in a 254-18 vote, after a long debate in which the Turkish Petroleum Co. was apparently not even mentioned.

[citation needed] During the 1920s the Naft Khana field was discovered and brought into commercial operation by the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. in lands covered by the 1901 d'Arcy concession, including some 20 miles of pipeline to a refinery at Khanaqin on the Iraq-Iran border northeast of Baghdad.

[15] Under the terms of the concession TPC was to conduct a comprehensive survey beginning within 8[13]: Article 4  months of March 14, and make the findings available to any future interested party.

[13]: Article 5  Another 12 months later and from thereon in intervals of 1 year, an auction was to be held in which 24 new blocks were to be awarded to any interested party, which would then enter into a sub-lease agreement with the TPC.

[14] In 1927 the deadline for TPC's selection of its 24 blocks was extended by one year to November 14, 1928, after ongoing border disputes had caused disruptions to the geological survey parties.

[29] The discovery hastened the negotiations over the composition of TPC, and on 31 July 1928 the shareholders signed a formal partnership agreement to include the Near East Development Corporation (NEDC).

The writer Stephen Hemsley Longrigg, a former IPC employee, noted, "[T]he Red Line Agreement, variously assessed as a sad case of wrongful cartelization or as an enlightened example of international co‑operation and fair-sharing, was to hold the field for twenty years and in large measure determined the pattern and tempo of oil development over a large part of the Middle East".

[39][37] The original concession of 14 March 1925 covered all of Iraq, but IPC was reluctant to develop it quickly and production was restricted to fields constituting only one-half of 1 percent of the country's total area.

These competing interests delayed the development of the Iraqi fields, and IPC's concession eventually expired because the companies failed to meet certain performance requirements, such as the construction of pipelines and shipping terminals.

[41] The Kirkuk production averaged 4 million tons per year until World War II, when restricted shipping in the Mediterranean, Iraqi (Allied) hands on the valve that supplied (Axis) Tripoli, then Axis fingers on the Iraqi valve briefly during May 1941 and the unavailability of refinery capacity in occupied France, forced down the production sharply.

[37] Three issues caused protracted negotiations among the partner groups of IPC: Revision of the Anglo-Iranian royalty: when the Iraq concession of 1925 was revised in March 1931, and IPC was granted a blanket concession over 32,000 square miles (83,000 km2) of territory east of the Tigris River, the question arose as to whether Anglo-Persian's 10 percent royalty should be extended to include the new area.

After lengthy negotiations the groups arrived at a compromise settlement in November 1934, which stipulated that D'Arcy Exploration (Anglo-Iranian) would be entitled to a 7.5-percent royalty on such oil as was produced from the 32,000 square miles (83,000 km2) covered by the revised Iraq concession, the oil to be delivered free of cost at the field, with IPC paying the royalty due the Iraq Government.

In exchange, the Red Line agreement boundaries were redrawn to exclude Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, Egypt, Palestine, and the western-half of Jordan, i.e. areas in which IPC had no presence already.

A separate loan of $125 million was arranged at the time for financing the construction of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, for which Jersey and Socony also in part stood in with guarantees.

[46][47] As the Red Line Agreement defined the company's sphere of operations well beyond the boundaries of Iraq, IPC's shareholders were keen to look for oil elsewhere in the Middle East.

Petroleum Concessions, Ltd. was formed as a holding company in October 1935, mainly because there was a representative of the Iraqi government on the IPC board and it was thought to be inadvisable to negotiate with other countries directly.

Represented by Stephen Hemsley Longrigg, the company's bid failed when it offered payment in rupees rather than the gold that King Abdul-Aziz (also known as Ibn Saud) desired.

[25] The failure of IPC to secure concessions in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia should not obscure the fact that elsewhere in the Middle East the company was successful in closing the "open door" of commercial opportunity to outsiders.

So successful were its efforts that by the end of 1944 IPC was operating in over 467,055 square miles (1,209,670 km2) of territory, an area larger in size than the states of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana combined.

In addition, IPC attempted, though without success, to extend further its area of operations by seeking concessions or exploration permits in Turkey and in the neutral zones of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

[60] The Sultanate, backed by the British government and the financial support received from IPC, attacked the interior of Oman on 25 October 1954 triggering Jebel Akhdar War.

The second major factor was inability of the Iraqi government at that time to source the technical knowledge and skill necessary to take over oil operations in the country.

[68] Law 80 did not impact the IPC's ongoing production at Az Zubair and Kirkuk, but all other territories, including North Rumaila, were returned to Iraqi state control.

The Soviet-Iraqi agreement of 1969 emboldened the Iraqi government and in 1970 they made a list of demands including ownership of 20% of the company's assets and more control.

[71] BOD obtained on April 20, 1932 a 75-year concession (full text: [72]) over a vast area west of the Tigris river and north of the 33rd parallel, [5]: 85  depicted by a World Petroleum map of September 1932.

with the concession came into possession of 7 wells already drilled on the Quiyarah field, southwest of Mosul, where many years ago German prospectors had struck minor quantities and which was (thus?)

As for transportation, the BOD had preliminary plans to lay a 500-mile 12-inch pipeline to Alexandretta (Iskenderun), close to the existing railway line with obvious logistical benefits.

An insert in the January 1957 edition read "In the light of present circumstances it has been found necessary to restrict the production of Iraq Petroleum and... publication will be bi-monthly until further notice."