UK-based oil firm victim of standoff between Damascus, Syria’s Kurds
Gulfsands Managing Director John Bell outlines his company’s plans and Syria’s energy prospects in an exclusive interview.
On Monday, the state-owned Syrian Oil Company announced that it had exported 600,000 barrels of crude oil from the Tartous oil terminal on Syria’s western Mediterranean coast. It was the war-wracked country’s first oil shipment in 14 years. More exports are to follow “in the coming period,” according to the company. In an interview with Reuters published on Tuesday, Riyad al-Joubasi, assistant director for oil and gas at Syria’s Energy Ministry, said the oil had been extracted from several Syrian fields, without disclosing which ones. The bulk of Syria’s oil is located in the northeast of the country, which is run by the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration in North and East Syria (AANES).
Control of oil fields in Arab-majority Deir Ezzor and Rmeilan — near the Turkish and Iraqi borders — along with the integration of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces into the national army, remains one of the main sources of friction between President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s interim government and AANES.
Syria’s oil and gas are expected to play a crucial part in helping to rebuild the country’s post-war economy. Once rehabilitated, the fields could yield up to 400,000 barrels per day, according to some estimates.
A deal signed on March 10 between Sharaa and the SDF commander-in-chief, Mazlum Kobane, is meant to give Damascus control of the oil and gas fields in the Kurdish-run region. But talks that are meant to build on that deal have largely stalled over the Kurds’ demands for a decentralized form of government that would guarantee their autonomous status. Sharaa refuses to cede to those demands, and US efforts to broker a deal led by Tom Barrack, the United States’ Syria envoy, have yielded no results. Without a deal, Syria’s economic recovery will remain a pipe dream.
