Iraq’s drilling market buys its water-based mud chemicals — PAC, xanthan gum, drilling starch, lost-circulation materials — largely through importers and trading intermediaries, because the products are not manufactured in Iraq at drilling grade. A large part of that supply commonly arrives through re-traders in third countries, each adding their own margin on China-origin product. Ironstone quotes the same class of verified, drilling-grade product shipped direct from the factory, CFR your Iraqi port of entry (cost and freight — sea freight included in the price), with staged payment terms designed around how Iraqi import payments actually work today.
Containerized chemical cargo for southern Iraq normally enters through Umm Qasr, the country’s main deep-water commercial port near Basra. From there, road freight typically reaches the Basra and Missan oilfield areas within a day. Cargo destined for the Kurdistan Region typically routes overland through Türkiye — a common route is sea freight to Mersin, then truck through the Habur border crossing — or up from the south. We quote CFR to the seaport; your clearing agent handles import clearance, and we prepare the document set they need before the vessel arrives.
Iraq rewrote its customs tariff schedule across thousands of lines in a reform approved in late 2025 and enforced from early 2026. Because the schedule is new and has been subject to legal challenge, we do not publish duty rates or bracket claims here — confirm the current rate for your specific HS line with your clearing agent before you cost a shipment. What we control is the document side: commercial invoice, packing list, certificate of analysis, safety data sheet, certificate of origin, and — where your import route requires pre-shipment inspection (Iraq operates a conformity-assessment program administered through international inspection companies) — we arrange the inspection at origin before the container ships.
They are separate clearance environments in practice. Goods entering through Umm Qasr clear federal customs; goods entering the Kurdistan Region through the northern border clear KRG customs; and cargo moving between the two zones has historically faced checkpoints and, at times, duplicate charges at the internal boundary. Unification of procedures has been announced as a goal, but a buyer planning deliveries to both Basra and Erbil should still plan them as two routings, not one. We quote each destination separately for exactly this reason — see the Basra and Kurdistan pages.
Since Iraq closed its central-bank dollar window at the end of 2024, import payments route through commercial banks that hold foreign correspondent relationships — and only a limited number of Iraqi banks currently do. For an importer, the practical problem is not only cost: it is that large upfront USD transfers are slow to arrange and hard to repeat. Our standard structure fits this reality: 30% with the order, 70% against the shipping documents — no letter of credit required, and the balance is paid only after the cargo is on the water and the documents prove what shipped. The full logic of that structure is explained in paying a China supplier from Iraq.
The buyer we are built for in Iraq is the supply layer, not the operator: trading and supply houses that stock mud chemicals for drilling and workover contractors, companies bidding state-company materials tenders, and mud-service firms that buy their own additives. If you currently buy China-origin product through an intermediary in a third country, the comparison is simple — ask us to quote the same specification, line by line, against what you pay today. Our offer is the goods with verification built in: factory audit, batch certificate of analysis against API Spec 13A test methods, and independent inspection before shipment on request.
Ironstone is a Canadian-registered trading company supplying China-origin drilling consumables with the checking already done. We are not a stocking distributor in Iraq and we do not run mud programs — your local supplier keeps the emergency shelf and the field service. We supply the planned, containerized volume underneath it.