Syrian energy minister to visit Iraq for talks on rehabilitating Kirkuk-Baniyas oil pipeline

BAGHDAD — Syrian Energy Minister Mohammed al-Bashir will visit Baghdad on Tuesday for talks on reviving the oil pipeline linking Kirkuk in northern Iraq to Baniyas on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, Iraqi and Syrian officials said.

Iraq’s chargé d’affaires in Damascus, Yassin Sharif al-Hujami, said al-Bashir is visiting at the invitation of Oil Minister Hayan Abdul Ghani “to establish understandings for transporting Iraqi oil through Syrian territory to the Mediterranean via Baniyas port.”

Al-Hujami added that al-Bashir will also meet Water Resources Minister Aoun Diab to discuss declining water releases in the Euphrates River, which have dropped from 500 to 300 cubic meters per second, and to develop a joint plan to address the shortage.

On Aug. 9, al-Bashir told Syria’s Al-Ikhbariya TV that he would soon travel to Iraq to study rehabilitating the Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline. He said the project falls within his ministry’s efforts to repair Syria’s electricity network after obtaining a World Bank grant.

The Kirkuk–Baniyas pipeline, built in 1952 by the Iraq Petroleum Company, extended approximately 800 kilometers from the Kirkuk oil field in northern Iraq to the Mediterranean port of Baniyas in Syria. At the time, the route offered Iraq a critical export corridor with a daily capacity of around 300,000 barrels. Operations came to a halt in 1982 due to political disputes, and although briefly reopened in 2000 to bypass UN sanctions, the pipeline was heavily damaged during the 2003 Iraq war and has remained out of service ever since.