Sam Kerr scored one goal and created another as Australia advanced to the Women’s Asian Cup semifinals, securing a FIFA World Cup spot in the process, with a 2-1 win against North Korea.
The North Koreans, three-time champions, had almost two-thirds of possession on Friday and played at a high tempo to keep the Australians unsettled, but weren’t able to convert their glut of scoring opportunities into more goals against a stubborn Matildas’ defence.
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The North Koreans had 21 shots at goal and 10 on target but couldn’t capitalise. Australia turned its only two shots on target into goals.
Kerr playing a key role in both.
In the ninth minute, the Chelsea forward poached possession from opposing captain An Kuk Hyang deep in the right corner and crossed into the area before Alanna Kennedy swooped onto a deflection and fired in a left-foot strike for her fifth goal of the tournament.
Kerr made it 2-0 two minutes into the second half with a left-foot shot after a defensive lapse from the North Koreans, giving 2023 World Cup semifinalist Australia a cushion.
But the North Koreans lifted their intensity again and cut the margin to 2-1 in the 65th, when Kim Kyong Yong passed into the box from the left and Chae Un Yong finish from close range.
North Korea unleashed a wave of shots on Australia’s goal but goalkeeper Mackenzie Arnold denied them the equaliser.
“It was a really good team performance defensively, (North Korea is) a good side and they had a lot of the ball and there was a lot of pressure,” Kerr said. “The crowd was immense today, got us over the line.”
World Cup spot still an option for North Korea
All four semifinalists at the Women’s Asian Cup qualify automatically for next year’s World Cup in Brazil. The Australians will next play the winner of Saturday’s quarterfinal between defending champion China and Taiwan.
The North Koreans get another shot at qualifying for the World Cup in a playoff next week. The fifth and sixth-place teams in this continental tournament will also secure spots in Brazil.
The end of the group stage earlier in the week was overshadowed by Iran’s departure from the tournament and the granting of asylum to members of the delegation.
South Korea faces Uzbekistan at Stadium Australia in a night match in Sydney on Saturday after China and Taiwan meet in Perth.
Late in February, Zimbabwe pulled out of a proposed $367m United States health funding agreement after objecting to provisions requiring broad American access to sensitive health data.
The five-year programme was presented as support for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and epidemic preparedness efforts.
However, the terms demanded extensive sharing of national health intelligence, including epidemiological surveillance data and pathogen samples, while offering no binding guarantees that Zimbabwe would receive equitable access to medical technologies developed from them.
Harare called the proposal an “unequal exchange”, warning that Zimbabwe risked supplying the “raw materials for scientific discovery” while the resulting benefits could remain concentrated in the United States and global pharmaceutical firms. Critics increasingly describe this pattern as biomedical extractivism: a toxic combination of exploitative research practices and colonial thinking that reinforces Western dominance.
In Lusaka, officials and civil society organisations have raised concerns about a proposed United States-Zambia health partnership valued at more than $1bn over five years. The draft would require Zambia to contribute roughly $340m in domestic co-financing while granting the United States far-reaching access to national health data and pathogen-sharing arrangements.
One controversial provision would allow the agreement to be terminated if Zambia failed to conclude a separate bilateral compact with Washington over minerals such as copper and cobalt.
Kenya provides a third warning sign.
Its High Court suspended a similar $2.5bn agreement last December after a legal challenge contending that it could expose sensitive health data without adequate safeguards under Kenya’s Data Protection Act.
Together, the disputes in Harare, Lusaka and Nairobi point to a broader pattern. They are unfolding against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding network of bilateral global health agreements Washington has been negotiating across Africa under its “America First Global Health Strategy”.
According to tracking by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a US-based independent health policy research organisation, the United States has signed more than 20 memoranda of understanding with African governments, with implementation timelines running from 2026 to 2030 and total commitments approaching $20bn.
A significant share of that funding is expected to come from African governments themselves, allowing Washington to market the model as partnership while deepening asymmetry, fiscal pressure and dependence. At least 17 African countries have already concluded similar agreements, many with fragile health budgets and little negotiating leverage.
These pacts finance programmes against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, Ebola and malaria while strengthening disease surveillance systems, laboratory capacity and outbreak preparedness.
Nonetheless, they shift bargaining power sharply towards Washington. In Nigeria, for instance, the funding is contingent on Abuja committing “to prioritise protecting Christian populations from violence”.
From Zimbabwe to Zambia and Nigeria, the central controversy lies in what the United States expects in return: health data and pathogen samples. In the era of biotechnology and pandemic preparedness, this information feeds the global bioeconomy, powering vaccine platforms, pharmaceutical patents and artificial intelligence-driven drug discovery. Biological data has become as strategically valuable as oil, minerals or rare earths.
African public health systems could become upstream suppliers of biological information, while the downstream benefits — intellectual property, pharmaceutical manufacturing and commercial profits — remain concentrated in wealthier countries.
Those anxieties resonate with a longer history in which medicine in Africa has been closely intertwined with imperial power, racial hierarchy and foreign domination for more than a century. During the colonial period, European administrations often deployed medical campaigns that combined disease control with surveillance and coercive governance over African populations.
One of the most brutal colonial medical campaigns occurred during sleeping sickness control programmes in French Equatorial Africa between 1921 and 1956. At the time, colonial authorities assembled entire villages for compulsory medical inspections and treatment. In many cases, people were forcibly examined and injected with experimental drugs intended to combat the spread of disease. Some medications, including atoxyl, were later found to cause severe side effects such as blindness and, in some cases, death.
Scepticism is also shaped by modern medical ethics controversies involving Western pharmaceutical companies. In 1996, during a meningitis epidemic in Kano in northern Nigeria, Pfizer Inc tested an experimental antibiotic called Trovan on 100 children at a field hospital.
Nigerian investigators concluded that it had been conducted without proper regulatory approval and a government inquiry described it as an “illegal trial of an unregistered drug”. Pfizer faced lawsuits from the Nigerian government and affected families and agreed to a $75m settlement with Kano State in 2009 while continuing to deny wrongdoing.
Public health systems produce laboratory results, epidemiological records, genomic sequencing and biological samples gathered during outbreaks. The global biotechnology sector generates more than $1.5 trillion annually and is projected to reach $3.88 trillion by 2030, making genomic data and pathogen samples among the most valuable scientific resources of the 21st century.
For decades, scholars of global health ethics have argued that international medical research must avoid exploiting populations in low and middle-income countries. In a widely cited 2004 study, bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel and colleagues argued that ethical research in developing countries requires collaborative partnerships with local researchers, policymakers and communities, as well as the fair distribution of benefits.
That principle is clearly absent from the structure of the American bilateral health arrangements, and the stakes are clearer in the post-COVID world. During the early stages of the pandemic, scientists and laboratories around the world depended on rapid sharing of viral samples and genomic data to track the spread of the virus and develop vaccines.
Yet, when vaccines became available, many African countries found themselves at the back of the queue while wealthier countries stockpiled supplies. The World Health Organization’s Pandemic Agreement, adopted in May 2025, seeks to address this imbalance through a proposed pathogen access and benefit-sharing system linking pathogen sharing to fairer access to resulting technologies.
Bilateral health agreements risk undermining those multilateral efforts. By negotiating directly with individual countries, powerful states such as the United States can secure privileged access to pathogen information without being bound by broader mechanisms designed to ensure equitable benefit-sharing.
Timely access to pathogen data remains essential to global health cooperation and pandemic preparedness. The controversy lies not in sharing itself, but in whether countries providing the data receive open and just access to the resulting vaccines, diagnostics and treatments.
African countries therefore face a delicate balancing act: safeguarding life-saving health programmes while defending data sovereignty, legal oversight and reciprocal partnerships. The answer may lie in collective negotiation through institutions such as the African Union and its autonomous health agency, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, rather than unequal and fragmented bilateral pacts.
Although formally voluntary, negotiations between a global superpower and financially constrained health systems rarely occur on equal footing. Washington, for example, has since moved to wind down its health funding in Zimbabwe following the collapse of the negotiations, underscoring the risk facing other African countries that refuse to bend to its will.
In the 19th century, colonisation advanced through divide-and-rule tactics as Western powers picked off African societies one by one. Only united action today can prevent powerful states from imposing new forms of imperial control through country-specific accords.
The United States is now pursuing biological data and pathogen intelligence through policies that risk reproducing the power imbalances of colonial extraction in new scientific form.
Our governments must therefore defend medical sovereignty with unity and resolve.
If Africa shares its data and samples, the United States must share its own on equal and transparent terms.
African bodies are not cheap, expendable commodities.
The Voice of Hind Rajab is a call to action, its makers and supporters have told Al Jazeera, and hopes are high for the Oscar-nominated film in the run-up to Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony.
Nominated in the Best International Feature category, the Gaza-set docudrama reconstructs Israel’s killing of the five-year-old.
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On January 24, 2024, at about 7:30pm, Hind died of her injuries while she was trapped in a car, surrounded by the bodies of her relatives, after her family was forcibly displaced hours earlier from Gaza City. They had attempted to follow orders and leave. But on their way, Israel’s army fired more than 300 bullets at the black Kia driven by Hind’s uncle.
Hind has become a global symbol for the suffering of Palestinian children, more than 20,000 of whom have been killed in Israel’s genocidal war.
“The Oscars are important because it’s one of the biggest platforms in the world for a film,” one of the film’s producers, Odessa Rae, told Al Jazeera by phone from Los Angeles. “The goal of this film is obviously to be seen by the widest audience possible … the Oscars allows it to accomplish more in the world.”
Palestinians, too, have high hopes for the film.
In Gaza, filmmaker Mohammed al-Sawwaf told Al Jazeera, “The arrival of Hind Rajab’s voice to these platforms, and its ability to break through the indifference that exists there, is in itself something extremely valuable.”
He added, “A story of a human being from Gaza has been presented as the story of a person with a life and meaning, rather than the image of a Palestinian appearing as a number on news screens or as evidence of an event within the framework of war.”
Gaza-based filmmakers Mohammed al-Sawwaf, left, and Ibrahim al-Otla hope The Voice of Hind Rajab wins an Oscar as it humanises the impact of Israel’s war [Courtesy: Mohammed al-Sawwaf]
‘Devastating message will reach further’
The film uses Hind’s real voice, recorded on emergency calls with the Red Crescent, in the moments before she was killed by Israeli forces.
“I hope fervently that this remarkable film will win in its Oscar category, so that its devastating message will reach further, and have greater impact on those in government in a position to bring this bloodshed to an end,” Juliet Stevenson, a British actor and one of the UK’s most prominent pro-Palestine voices, told Al Jazeera.
The 89-minute feature tells Hind’s story from the perspective of the Palestinian Red Crescent workers who attempted to save her, but were blocked from reaching her by Israeli forces.
Directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, a Tunisian who cast an ensemble of Palestinian actors, the film has captivated critics, won awards and, in September, received a 23-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival.
On Thursday, US lawmakers introduced the “Justice for Hind Rajab Act”, legislation aimed at accountability – a “step towards justice in Hind’s story”, said Rae.
Wissam Hamada, Hind’s mother, was separated from her daughter, having left by foot on the fateful day. Though she is unable to watch the film, as hearing Hind’s voice is still too much to bear, she has travelled with the filmmakers to several cities to speak about the unimaginable impact of Israel’s war on children.
An Oscar “would need to do more than recognise cinematic excellence – it must recognise that the story of a child and the suffering of an entire people cannot be erased or ignored”, Fatma Hassan Alremaihi, CEO of the Doha Film Institute, told Al Jazeera. “Awards alone do not change the reality on the ground. If the most visible platform in cinema recognises this film, it must also come with a commitment from the global community to protect and amplify the truth of the brutality we continue to witness every day.”
At first, Israel denied that its soldiers were even in the area where Hind was killed. After journalistic investigations, including by Al Jazeera, the army said it had raided “terror targets” in Gaza City that day. In January, Israeli officials told the BBC that they were reviewing the case.
“The hope is that such recognition is more than applause, but that it helps transform awareness into accountability and ensure that the humanity at the heart of Gaza’s suffering is neither denied nor forgotten,” Alremaihi said.
‘Don’t leave me alone’: Hind’s last words
Before her life was cruelly cut short, Hind had witnessed some of the worst of Israel’s atrocities.
In her last moments of life, she had begged her mother on the phone, “Don’t leave me alone, Mama. I am tired. I am thirsty. And I am wounded.”
“A story like Hind Rajab’s represents a symbol of thousands of other stories,” said al-Sawwaf, the filmmaker in Gaza. “There are thousands of women and men who had full lives, details, and dreams that are no less human than hers.”
“People in Gaza do not look at the Oscars or the arrival of these films as something capable of stopping the war, ending injustice, or changing reality,” he said.
The real impact, he believes, lies in changing how the world perceives what is happening in Palestine, and adds that “it may not change reality in a revolutionary way, but it changes how people view what is happening here.”
Two years after Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began, a “ceasefire” was reached in October, 2025. But since then, hundreds of people have been killed in Israeli attacks.
“Despite mountains of news footage, and a large number of searing films and documentaries chronicling the catastrophe, the world is largely choosing to turn its back on the destruction of the Palestinian homeland, the pounding of their entire infrastructure, the murder of their people, the violation of their rights and freedoms. Future generations will be bewildered and horrified,” Stevenson said.
“But this film – The Voice of Hind Rajab – has managed to penetrate through to the mainstream cultural forums. In being nominated for an Oscar, it brings these acts of barbarism and cruelty to those in a position to act, and make change.”
Gaza filmmaker Ibrahim al-Otla, who works alongside al-Sawwaf, said the film “conveys the truth about deliberate killings, field executions, and the erasure of entire families from the civil registry”.
“It helps deliver the real picture and expose the crimes committed against the Palestinian people in Gaza, [but] what is happening in Gaza is far more difficult than what the world sees in these films.”
A child walks near the car where Hind was found along with the bodies of her family members. Two ambulance workers who had gone to save her were also killed in Gaza City, February 10, 2024 [Reuters]
Israel has killed almost 600 people in Lebanon and displaced more than 750,000 in less than two weeks. This is the opening act of Israel’s Gaza doctrine applied to a new front. The formula is consistent: Displace – either by ordering people to leave or by destroying their means of survival. Demolish civilian infrastructure to prevent return and expand territory through so-called “buffer zones”. Fragment any coherent governance by carving territory into disconnected enclaves where military action continues at a lower intensity.
I spent three years working in Palestine before being expelled by Israeli authorities. I watched this doctrine develop in real time. Now, from Beirut, I am witnessing its replication.
In the West Bank, Israel has spent decades fragmenting territory and denying Palestinians any contiguous geography. Water wells sealed with cement, homes demolished over impossible-to-obtain permits, herders pushed from their land by illegal settlement outposts. In Gaza, the same logic was applied with far greater speed and fury.
In October 2023, Israel announced that every Palestinian north of Wadi Gaza had to leave immediately. Days earlier, Israel’s defence minister had declared a complete siege: No electricity, no food, no water. By labelling an entire population as the enemy, Israel created a class of expendable people. The military released maps with Gaza divided into numbered blocks. When your number was called, you were forced to leave. Evacuation orders became the alibi for the crimes that followed. People were ordered into al-Mawasi, a stretch of coastline Israel designated a “safe zone”, a concentration area for hundreds of thousands living in tents, where air attacks continued. So-called evacuation zones were depopulated and destroyed.
Classic counterinsurgency logic would have entailed “clear, hold, and rebuild”. Israel’s approach was radically different: Destroy, displace, dismantle. The goal was not to pacify territory but to empty it. In both Gaza and southern Lebanon, Israel has treated civilian populations as indistinguishable from the resistance they support. Their displacement is the objective. The collapse of their political representation is a condition Israel seeks to make permanent. This is settler-colonial logic in contemporary military form.
The same playbook has now arrived in Lebanon, but with a revealing difference from previous Israeli operations here. In the first Lebanon war in the 1980s, Israel sought to install a sympathetic government. Gaza has shown that Israel has abandoned that aspiration. The goal is no longer to determine who governs a territory but to ensure that no coherent governance exists at all. Nor is Israel alone in this; the UAE’s approach in Yemen and the Horn of Africa – and its support to Israel in Gaza – reflects the same preference for isolated enclaves. What has emerged is a regional doctrine of fragmentation shared between aligned powers.
Israel has issued evacuation orders for the entirety of southern Lebanon and southern Beirut. The familiar map that appeared on my screen in Beirut last week had the same design and the same deadly ambiguity as the ones we dealt with in Gaza; announced evacuation zones failed to match those shown on the map. In Gaza, those who crossed the invisible lines were killed.
Hundreds of thousands of people are now on the move. Schools have become shelters, health workers have been killed, and people are sleeping on the seafront where just two nights ago a tent was bombed. Israel has threatened to attack Lebanese state infrastructure if the government fails to act against Hezbollah – extending its aims from displacement and infrastructure destruction towards the forced destabilisation of the state itself. The Lebanese government has responded by forbidding Hezbollah from firing. This is precisely the internal fracturing that Israel’s strategy appears designed to provoke.
But Lebanon is not Gaza. Hamas was fighting with an improvised arsenal inside a besieged strip of land, and this already proved challenging for Israeli forces. Hezbollah commands more sophisticated weaponry, hardened infrastructure, and decades of preparation for this kind of war. It has shown it can absorb heavy blows and strike back, surprising both Israel and outside observers with the depth of its capabilities. Israeli ground operations in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa have already met significant resistance. It is here that the doctrine may encounter its limits – not through diplomatic pressure, which has failed to materialise, but through asymmetric military reality. Iran has made Lebanon’s fate explicitly part of any ceasefire calculus, signalling a unification of fronts that Israel had thought were weakened.
A doctrine built on the assumption of impunity has encountered little resistance in the conference halls of a so-called rules-based order. The Gaza doctrine is the expanded version of what Israel previously called the “Dahiyeh doctrine” – the use of overwhelming force against civilian infrastructure – now weaponised towards a larger end: The permanent redrawing of the region’s geography, demography, and political order.
This doctrine has developed in a vacuum of accountability. The International Court of Justice has been ignored. The Security Council has been paralysed. Governments have continued trading with Israel as it steadily normalised the unacceptable. Daniel Reisner, who headed the international legal division of Israel’s military advocate general’s office, was candid in saying that “If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it […] International law progresses through violations.”
The United States is not a bystander to this failure; it is an active participant in deepening it. At the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed the transatlantic alliance in ethnonationalist terms and cast colonialism as a Western achievement. At an event in Tel Aviv, US Ambassador Mike Huckabee expressed confidence that Washington would “neuter” both the ICC and the ICJ – the very institutions through which accountability might otherwise be pursued.
What is unfolding in Lebanon is the political continuation of an ongoing settler-colonial project. The evacuation orders are precursors to mass destruction, designed to prevent return and permanently alter the landscape. Stability in the Middle East demands more than ceasefire agreements that manage fragmented populations while permitting lower-grade warfare to continue. It requires unconditional enforcement of international law, full accountability for those prosecuting this doctrine, and the right of return and reconstruction – from Beit Hanoon to Beirut.
The International Energy Agency (IEA), a global energy watchdog, with several of the wealthiest countries as member nations, has announced the largest release of government oil reserves in its history, two weeks after the United States and Israel started their war on Iran with strikes on Tehran.
In retaliatory attacks, Tehran has launched strikes on Israel as well as US military assets and energy facilities in Gulf countries, and has closed the Strait of Hormuz, a vital artery in the global oil supply chain, driving up crude prices to more than $100 per barrel.
“The war in the Middle East is creating the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market,” the IEA said in its monthly market report.
While the IEA’s 32 member nations appeared hesitant earlier in the week to tap into the strategic reserves, they ultimately announced they would release nearly 400 million barrels of emergency crude. That’s one-third of the grouping’s total holding of 1.2 billion barrels of government reserves.
Previously, IEA member nations have released oil from emergency reserves five times: During the 1990-1991 Gulf War; after Hurricane Katrina in 2005; during the Libyan civil war in 2011; and twice after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
But is this latest release sufficient to calm down the disrupted market?
Security personnel ride on motorbikes, on a day of a protest marking the annual al-Quds Day (Jerusalem Day) on the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan in Tehran, Iran, on March 13, 2026 [Alaa Al Marjani/Reuters]
What has the IEA announced?
The energy watchdog argued that the supply shock triggered by Iran’s strikes on cargo vessels and its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz meant energy markets are facing a worse crisis than during the Gulf War of 1991 and Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Before the US and Israel attacked Tehran – and assassinated Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – on February 28, Brent crude was trading at about $65 per barrel. Now, it is above $100, and Iranian leaders have warned countries that it will not allow “one litre of oil” to pass the Hormuz Strait if attacks continue, and that the price could go above $200 per barrel.
Earlier this week, former IMF economist Olivier Blanchard was quoted by news outlet Business Insider that this could be possible if tankers carrying oil cannot be protected from Iranian attacks. “I find it hard not to have as a central scenario where oil prices will remain very high for a long time, higher than the market current prices,” Blanchard said on Thursday.
The IEA’s announcement of a plan to release 400 million barrels of oil is much higher than the 2022 release of 182 million barrels of oil by the group’s members after Russia invaded Ukraine.
“Energy security is the founding mandate of the IEA, and I am pleased that IEA members are showing strong solidarity in taking decisive action together,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the Paris-based IEA.
Birol applauded the member nations’ decision to contribute to the release from their strategic reserves. “This is a major action aiming to alleviate the immediate impacts of the disruption in markets,” Birol said. “But, to be clear, the most important thing for a return to stable flows of oil and gas is the resumption of transit through the Strait of Hormuz.”
About one-fifth of the world’s oil is transported through the Strait of Hormuz. That’s more than 20 million barrels daily on average. And coordinated IEA releases are usually spread over weeks or months, meaning only a portion of the 400 million planned barrels will be released in the short term.
The IEA has not yet provided a precise timeline for releasing the oil.
Neil Quilliam, an associate fellow with the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House, London, said, ultimately, the IEA release “will not make a large material difference” in the ongoing crisis.
“It really depends on the pace of the release. It is not clear yet what the schedule is,” Quilliam told Al Jazeera. By some calculations, such relief could evaporate as soon as three weeks.
“It’s a one-shot solution. It’s a high-risk strategy,” he said. “So, once that all is finished, there is no real alternative.”
After new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the slain ayatollah, struck an even more defiant tone in his first address on Thursday, oil prices shot up yet again.
Israeli soldiers walk by a billboard commissioned by evangelical group Friends of Zion, which displays a picture of US President Donald Trump with the words ‘Thank you God & Donald Trump’, in Tel Aviv, Israel, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, on March 12, 2026 [Nir Elias/Reuters]
What has the US announced?
The US created its own strategic petroleum reserve in 1975 after the Arab oil embargo exposed Washington’s energy security vulnerabilities.
It has the world’s largest reserve of countries which publicly report such reserves, with a maximum capacity of about 720 million barrels.
At present, Washington only holds about 415 million barrels of crude, stored in underground salt caverns along the Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana, as stocks have been depleted by Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Only China is estimated to have a larger stockpile currently, but Beijing’s holdings are not made public.
The US is currently the world’s largest oil producer and consumer, and has confirmed that it will release 172 million barrels of oil from its strategic petroleum reserve as its contribution to coordinated efforts with the IEA.
US President Donald Trump told a local news channel on Thursday that the US government would tap the strategic reserve, in its boldest bid yet to stabilise prices in the energy sector, and “then we’ll fill it up”.
Trump has previously criticised former President Joe Biden’s administration for tapping the reserve to bring down petrol prices.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said the release would begin next week and take roughly 120 days for delivery. He added that the government would then work to replace about 200 million barrels in the next year.
Will this plug the oil shortage straight away?
No.
“Oil molecules move fast, and so do markets. What matters is how fast the released volumes actually move,” Maksim Sonin, an energy executive who works with Stanford University’s Center for Fuels of the Future, told Al Jazeera.
“Unless the underlying problem is solved, no release can fix the market,” he added.
Helima Croft, head of global commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, added: “While the IEA has decided to release 400 million barrels from the group’s strategic oil reserves, with commitments from Japan, South Korea, France, Germany, the UK, and the US announced thus far, the market impact of the move may prove limited.
“Supplies will be constrained by the pace at which oil can be extracted from reserves.”
Trump and his officials have changed their position on the endgame from the hostilities against Iran, frequently by the time the sun sets in the other part of the world. The US president, however, insists that the conflict is a blip and not another drawn-out war.
“But the fact that they’ve rolled in with the IEA, and they’re releasing 172 million barrels, is significant,” Quilliam told Al Jazeera. “If we get beyond that timeframe [of ending the fighting and days that the strategic oil reserves can cover], what is the situation gonna be like?”
People queue to refuel their vehicles at a petrol station in Chennai on March 12, 2026 as an oil price spike caused by the war in the Middle East causes exasperation at petrol pumps across Asia, where many economies are heavily dependent on fossil fuel imports [R Satish Babu/AFP]
How quickly can the oil be released?
Not very. On paper, the US claims it can release 4.4 million barrels a day; however, its actual output is much smaller, and deliveries could take weeks to reach after a drawdown is signed.
The US would release its pledged 172 million barrels over the next 120 days “to deliver based on planned discharge rates”, Chris Wright, the energy secretary, said.
The US Department of Energy says it will be prepared to begin deliveries of oil into the market 13 days after the release and sale. It could take much longer if the oil needs to be shipped to Asia, where the shortage is most severe as a result of the fallout of the Iran war. That means that supplies may not reach Asian refiners until mid-May.
“The US is still in good shape, even given the current release volume,” added Sonin of Stanford University. “Such significant quantities cannot reach refineries in a day or two. It’s faster domestically, where pipeline connectivity is strong, and much slower when barrels are shipped.”
Regardless of the quantities of oil released from the reserves, “the government’s willingness to intervene is itself a strong positive signal to the markets”, Sonin told Al Jazeera.
Oil tankers stand parked near an oil storage terminal in Karachi on March 12, 2026 as global energy markets face disruptions amid the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. Tanker drivers in Pakistan said they were facing long waits at depots due to fuel shortages [Rizwan Tabassum/AFP]
Is it the ‘right’ type of oil?
The makeup of the entire 400 million barrels being released to the market is not known, but we do know what sort of oil the US has in its own reserves.
Currently, the US reserve has 155 million barrels of sweet crude, which has low sulphur, and 261 million barrels of sour crude, which has high sulphur.
Sweet crude is easier and cheaper to refine, while sour crude requires more complex refining and processing.
While US refineries have seen billions of investment which has equipped them to handle sour crude, many oil importers – such as India, where the energy crisis has caused the government to enact emergency measures to discourage hoarding – do not have the same refining capabilities, further complicating efforts to mitigate the crisis.
Oil comes in various types:
Extra-heavy crude: Extremely dense and viscous oil, close to bitumen, requiring complex and costly refining.
Heavy crude: Thick, dense oil with lower density that produces fewer high-value fuels and needs more processing to refine.
Medium crude: Intermediate density oil which comparatively lesser refining cost and product yield between heavy and light crudes.
Light crude: Thin, less dense oil that flows easily and yields more valuable products like petrol (gasoline) and diesel with simpler refining.
(Al Jazeera)
Will 400,000 barrels of oil be enough in the longer term?
Analysts have described the IEA’s release of oil reserves as a “Band-Aid”.
By charter, the IEA mandates its members, which include the G7 countries, to store emergency oil stocks of at least 90 days’ worth of imports.
Based on past precedents, data firms estimate IEA member countries would be able to boost their output by 1.2 million barrels per day at most on top of this. But this is only a fraction of the daily volume – about 20 million barrels – that sails through the Strait of Hormuz. Therefore, the release is unlikely to have a significant effect on world shortages, analysts say.
(Al Jazeera)
What other measures has the US taken to ease economic fallout from the Iran war?
Besides releasing oil from the US strategic petroleum reserve, the Trump administration has taken a few additional measures to ease supply pressures and attempt to curb rising oil prices.
The US Treasury issued a 30-day waiver allowing countries to purchase sanctioned Russian oil that was already loaded and at sea, amounting to roughly 100 million barrels, in an effort to quickly add supply to global markets.
The administration is also considering temporarily waiving the Jones Act, a US maritime law requiring goods shipped between domestic ports to be carried on US-built and US-crewed vessels, aiming to ease domestic supply bottlenecks.
