Oil was meant to set Irbil free. After years of clashing with Baghdad over revenue sharing from the country’s crude exports, officials in landlocked Kurdistan finally got substantial access to the sea with the completion in 2014 of a crude oil pipeline snaking through Kurdish territory to the Turkish border. That allowed the Kurdish government to export as much as 600,000 barrels of crude per day to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan — worth billions a year even with cheap oil prices.