The Rumaila oil field is about 50 kilometers southwest of Basra, Iraq.
Rumaila is a super-giant onshore field in southern Iraq, close to the country’s border with Kuwait. The Basrah Petroleum Company discovered it in 1953, and production began in 1954. Its location near Basra connects it to one of Iraq’s most important petroleum-exporting regions, where crude can move toward local refineries and the Gulf export terminals.
The field is among Iraq’s largest and has been estimated to contain about 17 billion barrels of oil, roughly 12 percent of Iraq’s reserves in commonly cited estimates. It was nationalized by the Iraqi government in 1961; Iraq later nationalized the remaining assets of the Iraq Petroleum Company and Basrah Petroleum Company during the 1970s.
Kirkuk is another major Iraqi oil center, but Rumaila is in the far south, not northern Iraq. Mosul and Najaf are also well-known Iraqi cities, yet neither is the nearby city identified in the standard geographic description. Rumaila’s position also made it strategically important during disputes involving Iraq and Kuwait, including the events preceding the 1990 Gulf War.