Western firms primed to cash in on Syria’s oil and gas ‘frontier’
US, British, French, Israeli and other energy interests could be prime beneficiaries of military operations in Iraq and Syria designed to rollback the power of the ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS) and, potentially, the Bashar al-Assad regime.
A
study for a global oil services company backed by the French government
and linked to Britain’s Tory-led administration, published during the
height of the Arab Spring, hailed the significant “hydrocarbon
potential” of Syria’s offshore resources.
The 2011 study was printed in GeoArabia,
a petroleum industry journal published by a Bahrain-based consultancy,
GulfPetroLink, which is sponsored by some of the world’s biggest oil
companies, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, Shell, Total,
and BP.
US-led coalition forces carry out a large-scale attack on Syria’s Omar oil field
