The United Emblem loaded 1.045mn barrels of crude at Ceyhan, Turkey, on Monday and is now in the Mediterranean Sea, Fayyad al-Nima, Iraq’s deputy oil minister for refining affairs, said.

Iraq’s oil ministry said the country’s self-governing Kurds illegally shipped a second crude cargo from a Turkish port and urged other governments to help ward off potential buyers.

The United Emblem loaded 1.045mn barrels of crude at Ceyhan, Turkey, on Monday and is now in the Mediterranean Sea, Fayyad al-Nima, Iraq’s deputy oil minister for refining affairs, said by phone from Baghdad yesterday. “We informed the foreign ministry to inform our ambassadors to tell governments not to deal with illegal oil,” he said.

The ship is the second tanker owned by Marine Management Services MC to be identified by Iraqi authorities as carrying crude produced in the Kurdish region, according to a database maintained for the International Maritime Organisation. Senior officials at the company’s offices in Piraeus, Greece, weren’t available to comment, according to a person there who answered two phone calls and wouldn’t identify herself.

The loading and departure of the United Emblem intensifies a years-long dispute over oil revenue and territory between the Kurds and central government of Iraq, Opec’s second-biggest producer. Tensions flared last month when the Kurdistan Regional Government began pumping oil through its own pipeline to Ceyhan, where ship-tracking data show the crude was loaded on the Marine Management Services ship United Leadership.