No one can ignore the reality any longer now that the conflict raging in Syria has evolved beyond the simple question of a people fighting for the right to participate in government and determine their own fate. Nor can the conflict be defined solely within the parameters of a Sunni-Shiite contest — despite an undeniably sectarian aspect to the fighting. Rather, the conflict has — to a considerable degree — metamorphosed into a competition over influence being waged among global and regional powers. The fundamental backstory to this conflict revolves around natural gas and gas-related dilemmas, which extend well-beyond the Syrian arena and directly encompass the other countries in the eastern Arab world such as Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Turkey and even Cyprus.

Indeed, the time may well have come to bring this issue into the open and out of the shadows, where it has been the preserve of specialists. Perhaps once the facts are exposed, their clash with public opinion will facilitate peaceful settlements and rational solutions, built upon shared interests and aimed at halting the killing of innocent civilians. This, in turn, may suppress the wars now raging and ward off the specter of future wars yet to come.

Russia is a major player in these gas wars. Its tight reins over the Syrian card and staunch support of the Syrian regime conceal its overriding desire to defend its strategic interests. Foremost among these interests is the preservation of its privileged position as Europe's main supplier of natural gas and, conversely, denying any attempt at establishing alternative pipelines outside Russian control. For this reason, Moscow has opposed Turkey's growing role in this respect, particularly since the proposed Nabucco pipeline project.

The Nabucco pipeline skirts those regions under Russian influence, connecting Azerbaijani gas deposits in the Caspian Sea to the European market through Austria. Now, Nabucco has been replaced with plans for the Trans Adriatic pipeline (TAP) and Trans-Anatolian pipeline (TANAP), which take a new, shorter route to Italy. Turkey has cultivated these ties since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, seen for example in cooperation on the completed South Caucasus pipeline that connects to TANAP. It also represented one of the principal challenges to Moscow's influence and role in the post-Cold War era. But Nabucco's success in providing an additional source of natural gas exports to flood the European market with a resource it badly needs has not yet been assured. The hope that it would do so had been — and still remains — the central goal of the cooperation between Turkey and Qatar. That cooperation, in turn, was embodied in the project to build an additional network tied to Nabucco route and, through it, to the European market. The pipeline was to begin from Qatar, continue to Turkey and pass through Saudi Arabia and Syrian territory. The Syrian government rejected this project in 2009 under the pretext that it would harm the interests of its Russian partner, with whom it has decadeslong economic ties. No doubt this refusal provided an additional impetus to Qatar and Turkey for the sake of moving forward in supporting the Syrian revolutionaries financially and militarily.