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Syria is an energy war. With the heart of the matter featuring a vicious geopolitical competition between two proposed gas pipelines, it is the ultimate
Pipelinestan war, the term I coined long ago for the 21st century imperial energy battlefields.
It all started in 2009, when Qatar proposed to Damascus the construction of a pipeline from its own North Field - contiguous with the South Pars field, which belongs to Iran - traversing Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria all the way to Turkey,
to supply the EU.
Damascus, instead, chose in 2010 to privilege a competing project, the $10 billion Iran-Iraq-Syria, also know as 'Islamic pipeline'. The deal was formally announced in July 2011, when the Syrian tragedy was already in motion. In 2012, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed with Iran.
Until then, Syria was dismissed, geo-strategically, as not having as much oil and gas compared to the
GCC petrodollar club. But insiders already knew about its importance as a regional energy corridor. Later on, this was enhanced with the discovery of
serious offshore oil and gas potential.
Iran for its part is an established oil and gas powerhouse. Persistent rumblings in Brussels - still unable to come up with a unified European energy policy after over 10 years - did account for barely contained excitement over the Islamic pipeline; that would be the ideal strategy to diversify from Gazprom. But Iran was under US and EU nuclear-related sanctions.
That ended up turning into a key strategic reason, at least for the Europeans, for a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear dossier; a 'rehabilitated' (to the West) Iran is able to become a key source of energy to the EU.
Yet, from the point of view of Washington, a geostrategic problem lingered: how to break the Tehran-Damascus alliance. And ultimately, how to break the Tehran-Moscow alliance.
Comment: Remember Hollande has the aircraft carrier moving to the Persian Gulf. Still no mention of coordination with Russia.