Iraq and Syria to re-open crucial oil pipeline
An end to US regional resource piracy is finally in sight with Russia and Iran alliance
The Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline revival.
According to various media reports- negotiations are ongoing to revive the strategic Iraqi Kirkuk to Syrian Baniyas oil pipeline. Iraqi Trade Minister Atheer Al Ghurairy has intimated increased efforts by Iraq to develop energy cooperation with Syria in the coming months and years.
During a meeting with the Syrian Oil and Mineral Resources Minister Firas Hassan Kaddour views were exchanged on the launch of investment in oil and energy fields in both countries. Despite the current US military and proxy occupation of Syrian oil resources, Kaddour presented a strategy to facilitate investment by Iraqi companies in the Syrian oil industry. On the table was the restoration of the Kirkuk-Baniyas oil pipeline which would re-connect Iraqi oil fields with Syrian maritime ports and crude oil refineries.
This would resolve some of Syrian energy deprivation issues and provide Iraq with a more expedient oil transport route to refineries in Syria that could process the 12% of total Iraqi oil reserves that originate in Kirkuk.
The reactivation of the Kirkuk-Banias oil pipeline will be “crucial” for Syria as it would end the country’s power crisis, the minister said, adding that the pipeline is of an “exponential importance” for Iraq as it could cut the cost of exporting oil.
For Syria, added benefits would include a stimulation of trade in Syrian ports by increasing maritime traffic despite the threat of punitive US Caesar sanctions that target sovereign nations trade or collaboration with Syria. The Syrian economy would receive a boost from such trade and industry revival.
Atheer said that initial assessments indicate that the oil pipeline, which was heavily damaged during the war in Syria and recent conflicts in Iraq, is in need of extensive maintenance with a high cost. According to the minister, one possible scenario to solve this issue is for each country to bear the cost of fixing the damage on its part of the pipeline. (SouthFront)
History of Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline and its geopolitical importance
The 800-kilometer long pipeline, which can discharge 0.3 million barrels of oil per day, was constructed by the globalist US Bechtel Corporation in 1952.
The major reason for the U.S. invasion in March 2003 was to get control of Iraq’s oil. A related factor was the intention of the ruler of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, to sell Iraq’s oil in Euros rather than U.S. dollars, which would have encouraged other oil producers to do the same, thereby endangering the dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency, which is crucial to the U.S.’s economic viability. The genocidal invasion and preceding sanctions killed three million Iraqis, including half a million children, and totally destroyed a relatively advanced developing country whose people were largely prosperous| Asad Ismi
After the pre-planned and unlawful invasion of Iraq launched by the US in March 2003, Bechtel Corp. was one of the primary benefactors of the US savagery with and estimated $ 3 billion in Iraq reconstruction contracts. It is worth noting that military industrial complex leader Lockheed Martin was handed “more than $ 11 billion increase in sales and contracts worth $ 5.6 million with the US Air Force in Iraq.” Bechtel made it onto the Business Pundit’s list of the ‘25 most vicious Iraq war profiteers’.
The pipeline was commissioned in 1952. Between 1982 and 2000 the pipeline was shut by Iraq, due to Syrian support to Iran during the Iran–Iraq war, and its later support for the liberation of Kuwait campaign. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the pipeline was damaged by United States airstrikes and remained out of operation since then.| SouthFront
Syria and Iraq made several attempts to reactivate the strategic oil pipeline between 2007 and 2010. However, technical and political hurdles kept the pipeline shut down.
Pumping was resumed in 2010 but did not last long due to the start of the regime change war against Syria and the occupation of much of the route by ISIS terrorist groups. The US also destroyed sections of the pipeline allegedly in its war on terror/ISIS which has been proven to be a fraudulent claim.
The Russia and Iran element
For some time Russia has been trying to secure an influential role in Iraq via the oil industry route amongst others. Russian oil companies have invested in many of Iraq’s oil fields since 2010.
In 2019 Moscow was planning to help Baghdad to transport Kirkuk’s oil to the Mediterranean sea. In 2007 Russian Gazprom was scheduled to repair the pipeline but Iraqi lack of finances were an obstacle. In 2010, as mentioned, Iraq and Syria attempted to get the pipeline up and running again.
The first pipeline was supposed to carry 15 million barrels of heavy crude oil per day, and the second pipeline was supposed to carry 125 million barrels of lighter crude oil per day.| Geopolitics
Back in 2019 Russia was trying to convince Iraqi and Syrian governments that it “can successfully implement the Kirkuk-Baniyas project”.
According to Iraqi academic and author Diyari Salih in 2019:
“The activation of this pipeline will reshape the relations between Baghdad and Erbil. Baghdad will get rid of its unilateral dependence on the transfer of oil to Turkey through the IKR. This will reduce the geostrategic importance of this region’s location. This option will also affect Erbil’s ambitions to control Kirkuk again. In such a situation, Baghdad thinks that it will have more futuristic opportunities to make Erbil leave the dream of separation from Iraq. Baghdad knows well that this Kurdish dream cannot be done without annexing Kirkuk to the imagined Kurdish state. As a result, Baghdad and its allies will tighten their grip on this vital city. Hence, the Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline might lead to postponing this Kurdish aspiration, at least, for decades to come.”
This pipeline track will also have potential to strengthen the Iranian-Russian alliance. Before ISIS took control of Mosul in 2014 there had been intensive discussions on an Iranian desire to build a pipeline connecting Iranian oilfields to the Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline.
From a geopolitical perspective the US regional resource piracy would inevitably come to an end. “There is a hope that this pipeline will link the fate of Iran, Russia, Iraq, Syria and even Lebanon economically and militarily” while squeezing the US and its Kurdish Contra proxies (Iraq and Syria) out of the equation.
The threat of a US-managed ISIS revival is also to be countered, with terrorist sleeper cells still embedded and active in Iraq and Syria but a united axis of terror-adversaries including Iran and Russia would be able to combat such a risk to the pipeline renewal.
Syrian and Iraqi efforts to reactivate the Kirkuk-Banias oil pipeline will likely face several obstacles, mainly sanctions imposed by the U.S. and the European Union. However, Syria’s recent rapprochement with key regional allies of the West, including Saudi Arabia, Iraq’s special relations with Iran, and the current global energy crisis could allow the two countries to reach a deal on the pipeline.| SouthFront
As Robert F Kennedy JR wrote in 2016 for Politico Magazine - “Why the Arabs don’t want us in Syria”:
They don’t hate our freedoms. They hate that we have betrayed our ideals in their own countries - for oil
Let’s face it; what we call the “war on terror” is really just another oil war. We’ve squandered $6 trillion on three wars abroad and on constructing a national security warfare state at home since oilman Dick Cheney declared the “Long War” in 2001. The only winners have been the military contractors and oil companies that have pocketed historic profits, the intelligence agencies that have grown exponentially in power and influence to the detriment of our freedoms and the jihadists who invariably used our interventions as their most effective recruiting tool. We have compromised our values, butchered our own youth, killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, subverted our idealism and squandered our national treasures in fruitless and costly adventures abroad. In the process, we have helped our worst enemies and turned America, once the world’s beacon of freedom, into a national security surveillance state and an international moral pariah.
Over the past seven decades, the Dulles brothers, the Cheney gang, the neocons and their ilk have hijacked that fundamental principle of American idealism and deployed our military and intelligence apparatus to serve the mercantile interests of large corporations and particularly, the petroleum companies and military contractors that have literally made a killing from these conflicts.
It’s time for Americans to turn America away from this new imperialism and back to the path of idealism and democracy. We should let the Arabs govern Arabia and turn our energies to the great endeavor of nation building at home. We need to begin this process, not by invading Syria, but by ending the ruinous addiction to oil that has warped U.S. foreign policy for half a century.
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Hi Vanessa,
Sadly it’s not only Oil that has been responsible for the U.S decline, a decline of both moral leadership and actual as has been so well defined and documented by literally every measurable metric and across most recognised moral strata, sadly the diaspora, for a diaspora it truly is comprises a cocktail of interests, Corporate, Financial, individual being representative of malady’s, of causative effects and by the actual individual characters responsible, that they all share by what can only be described, as amongst some of the most odious and truly evil that have ever bestrode or existed upon this planet.
The U.S it seems is and has been sadly, for some time, administered by nothing more than a bunch of thugs, gangsters and frauds who seemingly revel in murderer, blackmail, assassination, intimidation and coercion whilst all the while exhibiting the twin traits of being both narcissistic and truly psychotic.
For how else can one even begin to comprehend or rationalise so much of what of late is being uncovered and known as having contributed to your nations past history, especially the past 115 years and to the immediate present?
Indeed many of your nations historians are happy to begin the decline of the U.S to the present with the nations very founding in 1776, more particularly, the years both just prior to independence and through the early 1800’s, whereby your founders post the winning of independence remained truly split, riven with factions between completely severing ties with the English Crown and European Aristocracy and the faction that were doggedly for retaining ties with the aforementioned influences.
This despite the oft repeated mantra that the nation was United in completely breaking free of the shackles of privilege and servitude, traits no better exemplified than by Madison, Jefferson and Washington to break free, whilst it was widely understood Hamilton, Adams and most of all and especially Franklin were enamoured and totally taken with the hospitality, the Aristocracy and Privileged lifestyle they were exposed to during their long sojourn (years) in Europe to secure European support and funding for the fledgling Republic.
Jefferson in particular having visited his colleagues in Europe for a time, witnessing the transformation impacting them as they succumbed to the benefits and hospitality afforded them during their stay, to the life of privilege enjoyed the aristocracy as adroitly foisted upon them whilst domiciled in Europe, swore his new nation would do all it could to shake the treatise and impact of such turpitude, essentially becoming the driver and instigator by which he was so heavily motivated to author your nations famous founding documents.
Sadly, it seems from the very beginning the Commercial interests of the few, the connected, wealthy and powerful have dominated your nations political landscape as it strived to break free from the vestiges of the World some of the founders wished and had fought ever so hard to ensure, they leave behind.
We see this still today, your references to CIA Director Dulles, a real scumbag if ever there was one, his outsized influential brother, together with the many Multi National Corporatists, exemplified Cheney, more latterly Gates, Pfizer, J.P Morgan et al amongst many, a visceral reminder of the same that has plagued it seems your nation since it’s beginning.
One need only reflect on. The many interventions over the years on behalf of the monied and Corporate class, establishing the Fed, the IRS, the colonising of the Phillipines, of many territories and nations all facilitated in many cases on behalf of Corporates real and or contrived such as the campaign by by Dole in the Pacific to establish its monopoly, the ventures by and using the CIA via front companies especially in Central America,the Middle East, o the point of late they became so brazen, it was simply a case of identify, go in, destroy, plunder and leave (Think Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Ukraine, Haiti, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Georgia, Afghanistan and on and on and on) Also to the many other nations that through vested interests have had caused and visited upon them so much pillage, plunder, misery and destruction let alone death.
All achieved resulting from the same old trope and playbook agitated for by these cretins, for the spilling of your actions greatest treasure, the blood of your service members on literally every continent on the planet, to the point you now have in excess of 900 military bases ringing the planet acting as enforcers, your NGO’s and Aide programs shams and fronts all with benign sounding names USAID, Centre For Democracy, Atlantic Council, etc, etc, consequently your foreign policy is nothing less than bullying or intimidating others to do your bidding, to bend to your will, point of the gun diplomacy in other words, whether it’s been via a battleship, aircraft or soldiers, it has made no difference… coups, regime change, assassination or attempts on assassination(JFK Kennedy, RF Kennedy, Abe, attempts on Reagan, Trump, Imrahn Kahn, Putin and a swag of others) all in a bid and more so lately in a bid to maintain and preserve the vile politics of American exceptionalism and its latest iteration, the almost demonic and maniacal “Rules based Order” but whose rules, certainly not the International community’s.
Hence the psychopaths and narcissists that especially these past 70 years and more latterly have as you point out, bestrode this earth as if infallible, they have caused millions upon millions of innocent to die, to be injured, homeless, displaced and to despair, little wonder, many of those impacted and their descendants turned into vengeful seeking functionaries of some of the worlds worst terrorist entities.
Sadly for the U.S, a nation that promised so much to the World, it has delivered so very little of what it had promised, instead substituting democracy for dictatorship, regime change, over throw of truly democratic governments the world over, deputising its appointed and puppets into committing some of the most egregious acts of inhumane treatment on people the world over, now 2023, your government and its agencies happy to introduce to the homeland what had for decades been exported all around the world.
Loss of many of the freedoms U.S citizens have taken for granted, a dictatorial approach to governance (Think COVID Scamdemic) an open border, assaults on speech, your captured media, the Woke Agenda, transgender impact your children, moral decay, the Uniparty dynamic, politicising of what should be apolitical agencies, the overt manipulation of your financial markets and economy and on and on …. and it’s little wonder most Americans are on some form of medication, suffering fiscal and or a mental duress or stress related dysphoria.
The bright side….. As a consequence the World and many in theU.S, once so dumbed down by Cable etc… are waking up, waking up to the new reality, to multipolarity vs the Wests led the U.S unipolarity, to the fact your much vaunted democracy now exposed as Uniparty politics ad hominem has been amongst the longest and greatest frauds ever perpetrated on the American people, they have trusted essentially two cheeks of the same arsehole as the mainstay of their individual and collective democracy for so long now, no longer thankfully the people led by such as yourself are awakening.
America and the World, including in my nation of residence and birth New Zealand will so much the better for doing so and ridding ourselves of the filth that has taken so much from us.
Best always…. Kia Kaha .. Strength in Unity
This process will go much smoother if the US is pushed to provide Zelensky with more aid, and provocations against China are ramped up. Actual war against a competent military will break the bully. These actions will expedite the process of US capitulation to global resistance against the hegemony and thievery it has committed since WWII. The defeat of the American Rogue Empire will enable 60 nations to once again assert their sovereignty and the people of Syria to no longer live with fear and death.
Concomitantly, the US will shed allies, the first of which will be Australia, followed by Germany, NZ, France, Hungary and, eventually, Scandavia and Canada. As a novel responce to history, Isreal appears to have already installed its very own final solution to war mongering by injecting 95% of its population with mRNA/PEG. By 2030, there will be no Israel, nor its yearned for homeland, Ukraine.