“Russia! Russia! Russia!”, Greater Kurdistan and Qatar: What An Oily Tangled Web We Weave

by Scott Creighton

Back in 2011 before the US pulled out it’s forces, Exxon’s CEO, Rex Tillerson, signed a deal with the Barzani clan to drill for oil in 3 areas that Iraq still considered part of their country. That didn’t matter to Rex. Apparently Big Oil doesn’t recognize national sovereignty issues if they get in the way of profits. As if that was news.

“Hussain Shahristani, the Deputy Prime Minister in charge of energy matters, told The Independent in an interview in Baghdad that any oil or gas field development contract in Iraq “needs the approval of the federal government, and any contract that has not been presented to the federal government has no standing and the companies are not advised to work on Iraqi territory in breach of Iraqi laws“. Independent, 2011

Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, saw this at the time to be a betrayal of his agreement with his owners in the US, the ones who put him in charge. Back then the Kurds were stealing chunks of valuable Iraqi real estate and claiming them as their own in their quest to make the southern section of what I call “Greater Kurdistan” which will ultimately involve chunks of Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran.

Apparently Prime Minister Maliki wasn’t on board with the creation of a new oil-rich power-house nation and so he simply had to go.

The Kurds have been terrorizing various areas of Iraq ever since, looking to depopulate them and then claim them as their own.

“War is an ugly business, but in some northern villages scattered near the front line between Kurdish fighters and the jihadis of the Islamic State, there is growing evidence of a far uglier crime perpetrated by America’s closest allies in Iraq. For months, humanitarians working in areas wrested back from the Islamic State have quietly documented a pattern of Sunni Arabs, who were displaced during the jihadis’ advance, being denied the right to return home.

Witnesses — including a half-dozen aid workers, a European diplomat, and a terrified resident of the affected area — say the Kurdish Peshmerga, the military force of Iraqi Kurdistan, has an agenda that goes beyond fighting the Islamic State: establishing the boundaries of a future Kurdish state and moving the Arabs out.” Foreign Policy, 2015

Today the Kurds are still up to their old tricks. They are demanding Raqqa be busted off as a piece of what they call “Rojava” or “Western Kurdistan” in their ruthless, blood-thirsty drive to make Greater Kurdistan. And they are engaged in ethnic cleansing of Syrian territories as well (see here, here and here) in fact, they’ve been doing it all along… as if that was the whole point from the start.

At the start of Russia’s involvement with the conflict, they targeted “ISIS” oil convoys as they fled Syria with stolen oil on route to Iraqi Kurdistan to put their loot in Kurdistan Regional Government tankers and ship it off to ports in Turkey on it’s way to places like Israel who were buying it up by the boatload.

And folks wonder why the Kurds keep allowing “ISIS” fighters to flee cities they’ve decimated so they can go do the same to the next one while the Kurds claim the city as their own.

A little while ago I put together a graphic to make it easier to understand the project: