VERONA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 25th October, 2019) The Syrian government will ultimately have to negotiate an agreement on how to share oil revenues with the Kurds, given that the militias have seized many oil-rich areas during the civil conflict, with Russia having the chance to play a role in the process, Mehmet Ogutcu, the Bosphorus Energy Club president, told Sputnik on the sidelines of the Eurasian Economic Forum in Verona.
According to Ogutcu, the Kurds control "almost 70 percent of Syrian oil and gas fields."
"They have to have an agreement, just like there was an agreement between Erbil and Baghdad in Iraq. But right now the sharing of oil and gas revenues, sharing of waters between Syrian Kurds and Damascus will be a key issue," he said.
Ogutcu noted that US oil giants had not managed to gain great presence in Iraqi Kurdistan, unlike Rosneft, suggesting that Russian companies might get projects on Syria's Kurdish territories.
"I think this could be negotiated. Russian energy presence in the middle East is increasing. I don't think the Russians will turn a blind eye to oil and gas resources in Syria. They might not do it directly, but they might do it through the Syrian government," he suggested.
As the Syrian government and the Kurds joined efforts earlier in October to stop the Turkish offensive, President Donald Trump, which had earlier withdrawn American forces from northern Syria, stated that the US would leave a "small number" of troops in the area to protect oil there.
He also claimed that the United States, which abandoned the Kurds in the face of the Turkish operation, was ready to help them to obtain "some cash flow from oil assets," suggesting that one of US big oil companies would go there to "do it properly."
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, in turn, told reporters that all oil facilities in northeast Syria should go under the Syrian government's control.
