Violent winds have disrupted oil exports from Iraq's main southern oil port of Basra for the past four days, an Iraqi oil engineer said on Tuesday.

Exports have halted completely since early Monday and may restart later in the day, the engineer and a shipping agent said.

Only one of eight ships waiting to dock since Saturday had managed to berth, said the engineer, who declined to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the press.

That ship loaded up and left on Monday at 11am local time (0800 GMT), the engineer said.

The very bad weather is preventing tankers from reaching the ports to be loaded with the crude, but there's no problem with pumping. We are expecting just one (of the seven ships) to be able to dock today, but we aren't sure,' the source said.

Basra ships around 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd) of Iraq's around 2 million bpd of exports.-Reuters