The economy of Nineveh.

From the heavy-oil field at Qayyarah and the new 70,000-barrel-per-day Nineveh refinery now under construction to the wheat belt of the Jazira plain, the rebuilt bazaars of Mosul Old City, the Mishraq sulfur reserves — the world's largest — and the reconstruction sector that has become an economic activity in itself: a survey of how Nineveh earns and spends, what 2014–2017 cost it, and how the recovery is being financed.

Nineveh's economy is best understood as three layered systems. At its base sits a hydrocarbon and minerals economy anchored by the Qayyarah heavy-oil field, the Qayyarah-1 refinery, the Mishraq sulfur reserves and the regional electricity infrastructure — long-standing assets that survived the 2014–2017 occupation in damaged form and have been progressively restored, with substantial new investment now in train. Above this sits a rural agricultural economy organised around the Jazira wheat and barley belt and the rain-fed cropping systems that have for centuries linked the province to the wider Iraqi food supply. And running through both is the trading, manufacturing and bazaar economy of Mosul itself — historically one of the great commercial cities of the Tigris and the central Aleppo–Mosul–Tehran caravan route, now slowly rebuilding the urban commerce that 2014–2017 destroyed.

The 2014–2017 catastrophe is the defining recent event for every part of this economy. Daesh occupied Mosul on 10 June 2014 and the rest of Nineveh shortly afterwards; the group looted the central bank in Mosul, extorted money from businesses and farmers across the territory, seized the oil installations, and operated its own parallel rent-extraction economy for two and a half years. The 2017 retaking left Mosul Old City roughly 80% destroyed (Heritage, § i), the Mosul Museum sacked (Heritage, § iv), the airport in ruins, several thousand businesses destroyed, the Qayyarah oil installations damaged by retreating Daesh forces, and several hundred thousand people displaced. The post-2017 recovery has been substantial — the Al-Nūrī Mosque reopened in September 2025, the airport in July 2025, the Qayyarah field resumed exports in May 2023, the wheat surplus has been recovered, the bazaars are rebuilt — but it is incomplete, and the underlying structural challenges of the Iraqi economy (heavy oil dependence, weak private sector, high youth unemployment, large housing deficit) are sharper in Nineveh than in many other provinces.

i. Overview: Nineveh's position in the Iraqi economy

Iraq's national economy in 2025 was a roughly $690-billion (PPP) hydrocarbon-dominated upper-middle-income economy, with oil accounting for an estimated 53% of real GDP, 88% of government revenues and 91% of merchandise exports (World Bank, October 2025). The country ranks fifth in the Arab world by GDP (PPP), seventh in the Middle East and North Africa, and 51st globally. Population reached approximately 47 million in 2025, with an annual growth rate of about 1.99% and a Human Development Index of 0.695. National unemployment is around 13.5%–15.5%, with labour-force participation at 38% — both significantly worse than the regional average. Iraq holds the world's fifth-largest proven crude oil reserves, with 147.22 billion barrels at the end of 2017.

Within this national picture, Nineveh sits as Iraq's second-largest population centre by city (Mosul, after Baghdad) and one of the largest by governorate, with a pre-2014 population estimated at roughly 3.4 million. Reliable provincial-GDP figures for Nineveh are not produced on a consistent basis, but the province's principal economic functions are clear: substantial hydrocarbon production from Qayyarah and ancillary fields; large agricultural output, particularly from the Jazira plain; a manufacturing base centred on Mosul and including textiles, food processing, cement, building materials and fertiliser; trading activity along the Mosul–Erbil, Mosul–Baghdad and Mosul–Syria/Turkey corridors; and, since 2017, a substantial reconstruction-finance flow from international donors and the Iraqi federal government.

The 2014–2017 events were classified by the World Bank as among the most economically destructive episodes of any post-conflict reconstruction context in recent decades. The Bank's Iraq Reconstruction and Investment framework identifies seven directly-affected governorates — Nineveh, Saladin, Al Anbar, Diyala, Kirkuk, Babil and Baghdad — with Nineveh among the most heavily damaged. Major channels by which the conflict spilled into the wider economy included internal displacement, loss of markets in conflict areas, the indirect costs of military mobilisation and demobilisation, and the loss of community cohesion. This spillover compounded structural problems that pre-dated 2014, including inequity of public-service delivery and the historical absence of productive private-sector investment.

ii. Oil, gas and minerals

Nineveh's hydrocarbon and minerals economy is anchored by a small number of large, long-established installations. The principal asset is the Qayyarah field (Arabic al-Qayyāra, the name derived from the Arabic word for tar; sometimes rendered Qayara or Qaiyarah), in the Mosul district approximately 20 km south of the city on the west bank of the Tigris and 70 km west of the Kirkuk field. Qayyarah has been producing heavy oil since the 1930s, when it was explored by the British Oil Development Company; it holds approximately 800 million barrels of estimated reserves. In Iraq's second petroleum licence round of December 2009, development rights were awarded to Angola's national oil company Sonangol, which took a 75% stake against the North Oil Company's 25% as secondary partner; Sonangol committed to a production plateau of 110,000 barrels per day in return for $6 per barrel from the Iraqi government. The adjacent Najmah field, tendered in the same round, remains undeveloped.

Production at Qayyarah was halted in March 2020 — when monthly exports had been around 129,000 bpd, having fallen from a previous level near 490,000 bpd — and was resumed in May 2023 by Iraqi Oil Minister Hayan Abdul-Ghani after a three-year hiatus. The current field has a capacity of 33,000 bpd, with about 30,000 bpd going by tanker truck and rail to Basra for international export (via the State Oil Marketing Organization, SOMO, and the Iraqi Oil Tankers Company) and approximately 3,000 bpd supplied to the Qayyarah-1 refinery (see below). Drilling has continued under Sonangol: in March 2025 the Iraqi Drilling Company (IDC) completed the first of 13 new wells under contract, using the IDC 223 rig. Qayyarah's oil is heavy and was historically of limited commercial interest because the Iraqi state did not know how to refine it efficiently; recent investment and contracting are aimed at scaling production toward the contracted Sonangol plateau over the coming years.

The Qayyarah-1 refinery, operated by the Iraqi state North Refineries Company, began operations in 1955 and is a non-integrated facility with a crude distillation capacity of 20,000 barrels per day and a Nelson Complexity Index of 1.43. The refinery contains a sulfur recovery unit, hydrocracking unit, reforming unit, hydrotreating unit, flashing unit, distillation unit and catalyst regeneration units. Capital expenditure of approximately $891.8 million is projected over the 2021–2025 period, and the refinery's capacity is planned to expand to 90,000 bpd by 2030. In June 2024 Iraq signed a memorandum of understanding with the American company Honeywell for refinery development; the Qayyarah refinery is among those covered.

A significant new project is the Nineveh refinery, a 70,000-bpd facility for which Iraq's North Oil Company signed a Heads of Agreement in 2025 with two energy companies — Sweden's SEAB and Turkey's Limak — for its design and construction in the Qayyarah area. Construction works were launched in mid-2025, with no published figure for total investment. The new facility will roughly triple Nineveh's refining capacity when complete.

Adjacent to the oil installations, the Qayyarah Combined-Cycle Power Station was inaugurated for construction in July 2025 by Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, with a planned addition of 375 MW that will raise the station's total output to 1,125 MW. The conversion of the Qayyarah Gas Power Plant from simple-cycle to combined-cycle operation was authorised by the Council of Ministers in February 2025, with the contract awarded to ARGAN INT. In late 2024, PM al-Sudani inaugurated several electricity infrastructure projects in Nineveh, including the Mosul Dam station with two 250-MVA transformers, the Yarmja South station, and transmission lines from Yarmja to Qayara — addressing the bottlenecks in the transmission and distribution sectors that had constrained both industrial and household electricity supply.

Beyond the Qayyarah complex, the province contains several other significant oil and mineral assets. The Ain Zalah field, in northwestern Nineveh near the Syrian border, has been producing on a smaller scale since the mid-twentieth century. The Mishraq sulfur mine, also in the Qayyarah area, holds the world's largest known sulfur reserves at 600 million tons; the Mishraq Sulphur State Company was established in 1969 and production began in late 1971, using the Frasch process to extract underground sulfur from rock layers at depths of 120–200 metres. The Mishraq plant had an annual production capacity of approximately one million tons of sulfur — a versatile mineral used in fertiliser manufacture, industrial chemistry and (historically) munitions. Production was substantially disrupted by the 2014–2017 occupation and the resulting fires at the plant, and recovery has been partial.

One important regional element is the Kirkuk–Ceyhan pipeline, which carried crude from the Kirkuk fields through Nineveh territory to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. The pipeline has been closed since March 2023 following an International Chamber of Commerce ruling against Turkey in a dispute brought by the Iraqi federal government over unauthorised Kurdish exports; technical and contractual discussions for its reopening have been ongoing through 2024–2025 but remain unresolved at the time of writing.

iii. Agriculture

Nineveh's agriculture is centred on the Jazira plain, the upland plain west and southwest of the Tigris that runs into the Syrian border. The Jazira receives approximately 300–400 mm of annual rainfall in its northern reaches — sufficient for rain-fed wheat and barley cultivation without irrigation — declining to under 200 mm in its southern margins where steppe pastoralism dominates. The province has historically been one of Iraq's principal wheat-producing regions; the Jazira belt, together with similar belts in Saladin and Kirkuk, accounts for the bulk of the country's rain-fed grain output.

Iraqi national agriculture has had a strong run in the 2020s. In 2025 Iraq achieved a wheat production surplus, with marketed quantities exceeding 5 million tons for the third consecutive year (Shafaq News, December 2025); the Ministry of Agriculture banned imports of more than 40 products to support self-sufficiency and expanded date exports to Asian and European markets. The government granted 252 agricultural licences during 2025 and approved one of the largest seasonal agricultural plans in government history. Nineveh's share of this national output is substantial in absolute terms, although precise governorate-level figures are not consistently published. Other Nineveh agricultural products include barley, lentils, chickpeas, watermelons (notably from the Qayyarah area, where Sunni Arab farmers of the Jubur tribe grow them), olives, tomatoes and other vegetables, with livestock — sheep, goats and some cattle — providing supplementary income and meat.

The 2014–2017 occupation severely disrupted Nineveh agriculture. Daesh extorted money from farmers and seized grain stocks for its own use; large numbers of farmers were displaced; livestock was killed or stolen; and the irrigation, seed-supply and extension systems on which modern agriculture depends were degraded. The post-2017 recovery has been substantial but uneven: cropping has resumed across most of the Jazira, but at productivity levels often below the pre-2014 norm, and with significant numbers of farmers still bearing debt or land-tenure disputes that constrain recovery.

The longer-term challenges for Nineveh agriculture are structural and shared with the wider Iraqi sector. Water scarcity is the dominant pressure: reduced Tigris flows since the construction of upstream Turkish dams, declining groundwater, increasing temperatures and more frequent drought years have all compressed the area of viable cultivation. The wider Iraqi agricultural decline since 2003 has been substantial: in 2011 an agricultural adviser to the Iraqi government, Layth Mahdi, summarised that Iraq had moved from importing approximately 30% of its food needs annually pre-2003 to importing 90% of its food at an annual cost of more than $12 billion, following the abrupt 2003 shift from subsidised state agriculture to free-market policy. The recent recovery — visible in the wheat surplus and the agricultural-licence expansion of 2024–2025 — is real but partial, and the Jazira specifically remains exposed to climatic risks.

iv. Trade and commerce

Mosul's strategic location at the junction of the Tigris valley and the historic caravan routes connecting Aleppo, Diyarbakır, Tehran and Baghdad made it for centuries one of the great commercial cities of upper Mesopotamia. The classical Mosul economy combined long-distance trade in textiles (the city gave its name to "muslin" in European languages), spices, leather and metalware with a vibrant urban bazaar economy serving the agricultural hinterland and providing onward distribution to the Kurdish, Turkmen and Syrian markets. The city's principal bazaars — Bab al-Tob, Bab al-Saray, the silver and gold suqs, the textile and clothing quarters — were among the principal social institutions of Mosul through the Ottoman, Mandate and modern Iraqi periods.

The 2014–2017 events ended this trading function abruptly. Daesh looted the central bank, extorted businesses, displaced traders, destroyed shopfronts and parts of the bazaar fabric, and rendered cross-border trade with Syria and Turkey impossible from the Daesh-controlled territory. The retaking of Mosul in 2017 left the Old City bazaars in ruins; the UNESCO estimate is that approximately 80% of the historic Old City was destroyed.

The post-2017 commercial recovery has been one of the more visible aspects of the wider reconstruction. The Bab al-Tob market reopened in early 2020 and most commercial units were fully operational by 2025; the Sulaiman al-Sayegh House and the wider Meydan neighbourhood have been gradually rebuilt. UNESCO's rehabilitation of 124 traditional moslawi heritage houses in the Old City (Heritage, § i; Tourism, § iv), including the Mosul Heritage Art House overlooking the Al-Nūrī Mosque, has restored both retail premises and traditional craft workshops to the commercial fabric of the Old City. The September 2025 inauguration of the rebuilt Al-Nūrī Mosque, Al-Saa Convent and Al-Tahera Church created a substantial cultural-tourism flow into the Old City that has supported the rebuilt commercial activity.

Cross-border trade with Syria and Turkey, historically a significant component of the Mosul economy, has been complicated by post-2017 security arrangements and the security situation in northern Syria. The Mosul–Erbil corridor has functioned throughout, and is one of the principal commercial lifelines of the province; the Mosul–Baghdad corridor likewise. International tourism flows reopened with the July 2025 reopening of Mosul International Airport (Infrastructure, § iv; Tourism, § vii). The construction in the Mosul area of a section of Iraq's strategic "Development Road" project — a $17-billion road-and-rail corridor announced by Prime Minister al-Sudani to link the Grand Faw Port in southern Iraq with the Turkish border, with World Bank financing of $930 million announced in June 2025 for railway extension and modernisation — has the potential to restore Mosul's historic transit-economy role on a scale not seen since the early twentieth century.

v. Manufacturing and industry

Mosul's pre-2014 manufacturing base was modest in absolute size but diversified: textiles, food processing, building materials, cement, sugar, and fertiliser manufacture. The Ba'athist nationalisation of oil in 1972 was accompanied by a programme of state-led industrial diversification that benefited Mosul considerably; the city developed as a hub for cement, textile and sugar industries through the 1970s and 1980s. The 1991 Gulf War and the subsequent United Nations sanctions of the 1990s damaged but did not destroy this base; the 2003 invasion and the resulting insecurity caused further decline; and the 2014 Daesh takeover put an end to most surviving industrial activity in the Mosul urban area.

Of the pre-2014 industrial assets, several have been partially restored. The Mosul cement works, the building-materials industry (much of it tied to the reconstruction sector — see below), parts of the food-processing industry, and small-scale textile production have resumed at reduced levels. The Mishraq sulfur plant has resumed limited production. The Mosul fertiliser plant, like much of the Iraqi state-owned industrial base, faces both reconstruction needs and the broader structural question of how state-owned industries fit into a 21st-century Iraqi economy that the government has formally committed to diversifying.

One structural feature of Iraqi manufacturing applies particularly sharply in Nineveh: since 1972, when oil was nationalised, most Iraqi manufacturing activity has been closely connected to the oil industry (petroleum refining, chemicals, fertilisers). Pre-2003 diversification was hindered by limitations on privatisation and the effects of the 1990s sanctions; since 2003, security problems have blocked the establishment of new enterprises. The construction industry, treated below, is the major exception — and is now the most economically active manufacturing-adjacent sector in Nineveh as it elsewhere in Iraq.

vi. The reconstruction economy

Since 2017, reconstruction has itself become one of Nineveh's principal economic sectors. The financing flow has been substantial and multi-source. UNDP's Funding Facility for Stabilization (FFS, originally established as the Funding Facility for Immediate Stabilization, FFIS, by the Iraqi Government and UNDP in May 2015 and subsequently extended), has been the principal vehicle for rebuilding basic services and infrastructure in liberated areas. UN-Habitat has been a major housing-reconstruction actor, with 8,000 housing units constructed since 2022 in newly liberated areas, including in Nineveh. The World Bank portfolio in Iraq as of October 2025 includes 10 active projects with a total commitment of $2.24 billion, spanning transport, energy, social protection, water and municipalities, with the largest single recent commitment being the $930 million Iraq Railways Extension and Modernization Project approved in June 2025.

Major bilateral donors have also been important. The United Arab Emirates, with Sheikh Salem bin Khalid Al-Qassimi (UAE Minister of Culture) and Noura bint Mohammed Al-Kaabi (UAE Minister of State) representing the principal donor at the 1 September 2025 reopening of the Al-Nūrī Mosque, has been the largest single funder of UNESCO's Revive the Spirit of Mosul programme. The European Union, the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy have all been substantial bilateral donors. The ALIPH Foundation committed a total of approximately $15.8 million to the Mosul Cultural Museum reconstruction project (Heritage, § iv).

For the local economy, the reconstruction sector functions in several ways. It is a direct source of employment, supporting heritage-craft workers (approximately 1,300 trained in traditional stonework, marble restoration, plasterwork and joinery through the UNESCO programme by mid-2023), construction workers, project managers and supervisory staff. It generates demand for local building materials, including the local fossiliferous limestone of the Mosul region and locally-quarried marble. It provides a market for local engineering, architectural and consulting services. And it has, through the systematic documentation of restored buildings, generated a substantial base of skilled heritage and craft labour that can support continued private restoration work in the Old City.

The structural feature of the reconstruction economy is that it is not a long-term basis for the Nineveh economy: the international donor flow is finite, the federal reconstruction budget is constrained by the wider Iraqi fiscal situation, and the work itself, by definition, becomes unnecessary as the city is rebuilt. The current question for Nineveh economic planning is how to convert the reconstruction-period employment and skills into a sustained private-sector base — a question that has been on the agenda since at least 2018 and that has not yet been clearly answered.

vii. Labour market and employment

The labour market is the area in which Nineveh's economic difficulties are sharpest. The International Rescue Committee's East Mosul labour-market assessment, conducted in the immediate post-conflict period, found average local unemployment of approximately 56%, particularly high among youth. The assessment characterised the post-conflict economy as "centered on basic needs" with limited growth sectors and market gaps, and dependent on the return of government employment and services. Security checks emerged as a pre-requisite for almost all income-generating opportunities — a structural feature that has constrained labour-market access for displaced returnees, particularly those with family connections in disputed-territory areas. Purchasing power was low, constraining business profitability across sectors.

The national Iraqi unemployment figure of approximately 13.5%–15.5% (World Bank, October 2025) is significantly worse than the regional Middle East and North Africa average of 10.9%, and the Nineveh figure is structurally above the national one because of the cumulative effects of the 2014–2017 displacement, the slower pace of private-sector recovery in liberated areas, and the lower labour-force absorption of public-sector employment in Nineveh compared with Baghdad or the southern provinces. The labour-force participation rate in Iraq is approximately 38%, well below regional averages, with women's participation particularly low.

The youth employment challenge is sharp. Youth aged 15–29 account for approximately 29% of Iraq's total population — a large cohort entering the labour market at a time when job creation is limited. The strong preference for public-sector employment, the limited absorptive capacity of the private sector, and the historical association of formal-sector work with state employment, all bear on Nineveh particularly heavily. The province's youth are entering a labour market that needs to provide several hundred thousand new jobs each year simply to absorb the entering cohort — a scale of job creation that the current private sector cannot produce.

The agriculture sector remains the largest employer in Iraq, generating approximately 20% of all jobs in 2019 — and a higher share in Nineveh specifically, given the province's rural population in the Jazira and the smaller districts. Agriculture is also one of the most vulnerable employment sectors to climate change. The 1996 sectoral employment breakdown — 66.4% services, 17.5% industry, 16.1% agriculture — has shifted with the post-2003 collapse of much industrial employment, leaving services and agriculture as the principal absorbers of labour outside the public sector.

Female labour-force participation in Iraq is among the lowest in the region, at approximately 11–13% depending on the survey instrument. In Nineveh the figure varies sharply by community: among Christian and Yazidi communities of the Nineveh Plain it has historically been higher than the Iraqi national average; among the Mosul Sunni Arab community it has tracked the national average; among the rural Sunni Arab and Turkmen communities of Tal Afar and the Jazira it has been lower. The disruption of 2014–2017 affected women's labour-force participation severely, both through displacement and through the destruction of the small-business and informal-services activities in which women had been most economically active.

viii. Banking, finance and the cash economy

Iraq's banking and financial system is dominated by the Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) and a small number of state-owned banks (Rafidain Bank, Rasheed Bank, Trade Bank of Iraq) together with a larger number of private banks. Banking penetration in Nineveh has historically been lower than in Baghdad or the southern provinces, and the 2014 Daesh takeover — during which the central bank in Mosul was famously looted, with hundreds of millions of dollars taken — set back what banking presence existed. The post-2017 restoration of banking has been steady but partial; many Nineveh businesses and households continue to operate in cash.

The wider Iraqi economy remains substantially cash-based, with financial inclusion well below regional averages. The CBI has pursued digital-payments expansion through the 2020s, with electronic point-of-sale terminals, the Qi card system for government salaries, and mobile-payment platforms all expanding rapidly; but the legacy of the 2014–2017 events, combined with continuing weakness of trust in formal banking among Nineveh populations, has kept Nineveh towards the lower end of the country on financial-inclusion metrics. Remittances from family members working elsewhere in Iraq, in the Kurdistan Region, in the Gulf and in the diaspora are an important source of household income for many Nineveh families; these flows pass through both formal banking channels and informal hawala networks.

The Iraqi sovereign credit position has weakened in 2024–2025. Fitch Ratings in late 2025 rated Iraq at B−, citing heavy dependence on oil and weak governance and warning of delays to the 2026 budget; the agency noted continued internal stability but flagged the structural fiscal risks. The fiscal balance deteriorated significantly in 2025 due to declining oil export revenues following the sharp recent rise in recurrent spending, prompting a significant cut to planned public investment and accumulating arrears with negative spillovers for non-oil-sector activity. These macroeconomic pressures bear on Nineveh through the federal-transfer mechanism that funds provincial budgets and through the constraints they place on continuing reconstruction finance.

ix. Outlook

The outlook for the Nineveh economy in the second half of the 2020s depends on a small number of large factors. The completion and ramp-up of the Sonangol-operated Qayyarah field toward its 110,000-bpd contracted plateau, with the 13 wells now under drilling and the planned expansion of the Qayyarah-1 refinery to 90,000 bpd by 2030, would substantially increase the province's contribution to national hydrocarbon output and the associated revenue flow. The completion of the new 70,000-bpd Nineveh refinery by SEAB and Limak would roughly triple Nineveh's refining capacity and add a substantial employer.

The maintenance of the wheat-belt recovery in the Jazira — currently producing well — depends on water availability, climate conditions and continued state support for inputs and offtake. The completion of the airport reopening (July 2025), the continuation of the heritage tourism flow (anchored by the September 2025 Al-Nūrī Mosque reopening and the planned autumn 2026 reopening of the Mosul Museum), and the maturation of the bazaar economy in the rebuilt Old City offer the most plausible route to a non-hydrocarbon-based service-sector recovery in Mosul itself.

The structural challenges are equally clear. The Iraqi national projection of GDP growth at 5.1% in 2026–2027 (World Bank Iraq Macro Poverty Outlook), driven largely by oil-sector recovery, will not by itself produce the jobs the Iraqi labour market needs at the scale required. The housing deficit nationally is estimated at 2.5 million units, with Nineveh holding a disproportionate share through the destruction of 2014–2017 and the slower-than-needed reconstruction since. The youth employment challenge requires private-sector job creation at a scale that does not yet exist. The continuing displacement of substantial Yazidi and other minority populations (Religions, § v) constrains the economic recovery of Sinjar district and parts of the Plain. The climate risks — particularly to water-dependent agriculture and to the urban energy and water systems — are increasing.

Nineveh's economy in 2026 is, on the evidence, doing better than at any point since 2014. The recovery is real, measurable, and broadly distributed across sectors. It is also incomplete, fragile, and exposed to risks — fiscal, climatic, security and political — that have not been resolved and that the wider Iraqi national framework does not currently provide a clear path to resolving. The longer-term question is whether the substantial post-2017 work to date is the beginning of a sustained, diversified provincial economy capable of supporting Nineveh's population at a reasonable standard of living, or whether it is the high-water mark of a reconstruction effort that will be followed by a return to the structural underperformance that pre-dated 2014. The answer is not yet clear, and the work of the coming five years will substantially determine it.

References

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