POST cURL request to REST API sending - php

Question

I've been trying for a while now to call a REST API, but still with no luck.
I've tested the connection, propreties and credentials with WizTools, so I'm 100% all the data is correct and working. Only when I try to connect to the API using custom PHP, things go wrong.
I use Fiddler for debugging and all I see is a request to the local path of the file with the code. For some reason, the snippet isn't calling the REST endpoint... I would like to know how does it come and what do I do wrong...
The code is hosted local (dev.testing.com).
At first sight, I would think the code below is correct, so I'm wondering why I get a GET http://dev.testing.com/talent.php HTTP/1.1 result in Fiddler, while I should get a POST https://api.some_url.com/package/REST/service/criteria?api_key=my_Key HTTP/1.1..
<?php
// Set all the data
$service_url = "https://api.some_url.com/package/REST/service/criteria?api_key=my_Key";
$service_user = 'iiii_My_Username:text:FO';
$service_pass = 'password';
// Initialize the cURL
$ch = curl_init($service_url);
// Set service authentication
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "{$service_user}:{$service_pass}");
// Composing the HTTP headers
$body = "<searchCriteriaSorting></searchCriteriaSorting>";
$headers = array();
$headers[] = 'Accept: application/xml';
$headers[] = 'Content-Type: application/xml; charset=UTF-8';
// Set the cURL options
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $body);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, '');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 15);
//WARNING: this would prevent curl from detecting a 'man in the middle' attack
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
// Execute the cURL
$data = curl_exec($ch);
// Print the result
echo $data;
?>