Across the media, commentators seemed to be hit by a surprise when Sunni rebel forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) took over the city of Mossul in Iraq last week. Rebel forces are now trying to capture the capital of Baghdad and have been successful in taking over Iraq's major refinery in Baiji on the border to Iraqi Kurdistan.

Speculations have run rampant about the impact of the attacks on international oil prices. Will we face another 2008 oil price shock? By how much will the prices rise?

However, while the last week's events have been surprising — especially after one might have thought that Iraq had gained its long-awaited peace — one thing is sure: You never know what is going to happen on the oil market, and the market will deal with it anyway.

From 2003 through 2011, analysts estimate that an average of 500,000 barrels a day has been off the market for technical and political reasons. Occasionally the market was short of up to 1.5 million or even 2.3 million barrels due to Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq invasion.

From 2011 onward, often more than 2 million barrels a day went missing — among these the Arab Spring and the Iranian sanctions. The conflict in Syria has removed about 250,000 barrels per day of the market.

A culprit point was reached last summer when Libyan militants stormed and shut down oil export facilities. Libya now only exports one-eighth of the oil it produced before the fall of the Qadhafi regime (about 1.6 million barrels a day). All in all, about 3.5 million barrels a day have been off the market since last year.

If about only half of Iraq's oil production would be attacked, another 1 million barrels a day would be missing In 2012, Iraq produced about 3 million barrels a day — of which Iraqi Kurdistan produced about 200,000 barrels a day.

This is unlikely as experts don’t expect rebel forces to be able move further into the Shia-dominated main oil production areas in the South, but there are several ways in which the oil market could deal with a comparable Iraqi fallout.

Firstly, temporary supply shocks can be cushioned of by the strategic petroleum reserves of the International Energy Agency's (IEA) member countries — the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserves currently holds 700 million barrels of oil, one of its highest stocks in history. The reserve sold one of the largest amounts of crude oil during the Libyan export shut down last year, 30 million barrels.

Secondly, Saudi Arabia could pump up an additional 1 million barrels a day — an option that is possible, according to the Economist. Finally, this could be the moment for Kurdistan to ramp up its production and to finally get Baghdad's support for its export agreements. Also, if the situation in the South stays secure, Baghdad could push forward the production of oil there, according to Michael Lynch.

Of course, hopes were high that once the political situation in Iraq would have settled, the country could have increased exports to at least 4.4 million barrels a day — at least the IEA expected Iraqi production would have jumped to 4.4 million per day in 2015 and 6 million by 2020.

Losing supplies from OPEC's second-largest oil producer would have an impact on the market, without doubt. But the market has dealt with numerous oil shocks over the past decades — and for now nothing is for sure anyway.