Syria: Another Dirty Pipeline War

Absztrakt

The war in Syria is motivated by intentions mostly excluded from official policies. It is all about great power rivalry, mainly between the US and Russia, but countries around Syria are also deeply involved. The main goal of the US is to replace Russian allies with that of the US: the war in Syria is an example of that. Replacing Assad’s power with no matter how radical jihadists aligned mainly with Saudi Arabia, and ultimately with the US could have allowed building a pipeline through Syria to Europe, supplying gas from US allies in the Middle East, when – as a result – Russia could be kicked out of the European gas market to the maximum extent possible. A Syrian government, firmly aligned with Russia, makes such plans impossible. Unlike the US, Russia is not interested in installing a gas pipeline from the Middle East through Syria to Europe since the project would lower European dependency on Russian gas. However, if such a project strengthens Russia’s allies in the Middle East, Russia will be most likely to support it, as she did before the civil war in Syria.
These pipelines are multibillion-dollar projects and they provide far more than enough reasons to wage wars and destroy countries, causing enormous human suffering. Since an entire country – that is Syria in our case – was destroyed because various parties of the conflict attempted to pursue their own interests in order to build their own preferred pipelines, most parties of the conflict lied to their public and even the risk of a new world war was raised, I consider pipeline wars dirty in nature.