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Page added on November 29, 2013
Turkey and Iraqi Kurds seal ‘secret oil deal’
Agreement to allow pumping of oil and gas through Turkey to world markets likely to anger Baghdad, reports suggest.
Oil and gas from Iraqi Kurdistan will soon be exported via pipelines through Turkey, after a tranch of contracts were signed in secret this week, Reuters news agency reports.
The deals were reportedly completed on Wednesday during a three-hour meeting between Nechirvan Barzani, prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkish prime minister.
The agreement is likely to anger officials in Baghdad, who claim dominion over all of Iraq’s oil resources.
An official told Reuters on Thursday that such an energy deal would be “an encroachment on the sovereignty of Iraq”.
The state-backed Turkish Energy Company (TEC), which Turkey set up to operate in northern Iraq, has also signed a contract to operate in 13 exploration areas.
In about half of those, it is teaming up with ExxonMobil, the US oil company.
The contracts also envisage the building of a new oil pipeline and a gas pipeline, aimed to help the region’s oil exports to climb to one million barrels per day by 2015.
The gas flow is likely to start by early 2017.
4 Comments on "Turkey and Iraqi Kurds seal ‘secret oil deal’"
Arthur on Fri, 29th Nov 2013 2:41 pm
Turkey and Kurdistan suddenly in the kissy-kissy mode. Turkey is slowly morphing from a modernist secular Kemalist nationalism of yesteryear towards becoming the guardian of the coming Sunni fundamentalist neo-Ottoman empire, within which the Kurds can have an semi-autonomous province of their own. Turks and Kurds both happy and no longer sworn enemies.
Meanwhile new fault lines emerge between Istanbul and Baghdad (with Tehran in the background), that is the process of carving out the boundaries between the rising Sunni (centered around Istanbul) and Shi’ite empires (capital Tehran). This fight will begin over the oil of Kurdistan and will end with the fight over and carving up of Saudi-Arabia. The real fight will be whether the oil & gas of the west coast of the Gulf will be Sunni or Shi’ite. This is the real reason why SA and Qatar are fighting Assad, because this ally of Tehran is blocking Turkish military aid in terms of tanks and troops from flowing into SA. Since the ill-fated US adventure in Iraq, which the Saudi’s always opposed, a Shi’ite dagger has been created ranging from Tehran all the way to the Mediterranean, separating Sunni political and industrial gravitas (natural leader Turkey) from real Sunni income (SA & Qatar oil & gas).
Arthur on Fri, 29th Nov 2013 2:51 pm
I forgot, here is a clear map showing the Shi’ite dagger straight through the Sunni world, the latter allied (for the moment) to the US:
http://deepresource.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/notalliedtousa1.jpg
J-Gav on Fri, 29th Nov 2013 4:53 pm
Ooh … this does not bode well for peace in the region. The old saying “resource wealth = blood” is liable to be reaffirmed soon.
BillT on Sat, 30th Nov 2013 2:16 am
Good analysis, Arthur. Glad I am not near the Middle East. I would prefer learning Chinese to being a Muslim. ^_^