LONDON: When US President Donald Trump welcomed newly installed Iraqi Prime Minister Ali Al-Zaidi to the White House on July 14, he promised “a lot of deals” were about to be done. “A lot” proved to be something of an understatement. Over the next few days, several deals, worth an estimated $60 billion, were signed across fields including energy, technology and health. The biggest deals of all were focused on the Iraqi oil industry. Iraq, said Trump, “has tremendous potential because of their oil (and) we’re going to create a lot of jobs for both countries, and we’re going to be taking out a lot of oil.” At the heart of the flurry of memorandums of understanding and agreements that followed was an ambitious plan to revive a 74-year-old, 850-kilometer-long oil pipeline which, according to the US ambassador to Turkiye, Tom Barrack, “will make the Strait of Hormuz an afterthought.” Al-Zaidi’s visit marked a pivotal moment in the relationship between the US and Iraq. After more than 20 years of an American military presence, the final withdrawal of the last US forces from Iraq is scheduled to be completed by Sept. 30. As the troops are getting ready to leave, America’s oilmen are preparing to replace them. While the two leaders met in the White House, a State Department official revealed that the US was supporting a joint plan by Iraq and Syria to revive the long-mothballed Kirkuk-Baniyas oil pipeline, to bypass the Strait of Hormuz bottleneck and regenerate Iraq’s oil industry. Three days after his visit to the White House, Al-Zaidi spoke at an American-Iraqi business summit at the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington, where dozens of agreements with Western oil companies were signed. Key among them was a deal under which Chevron will lead the project to revive the Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline. While the investor consortium works on a feasibility and financing plan, a joint Iraqi-Syrian working group is developing an intergovernmental operating framework. Built in 1952, the pipeline pumped about 300,000 barrels a day to the Syrian port of Baniyas until it was shut down in 1982 over disagreements between the Baath parties of Syria and Iraq. It reopened briefly in 2000, but was damaged by US airstrikes during the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and has remained inoperable for the past two decades. Although the prospect of permanently bypassing the Strait of Hormuz is appealing, both for Iraq’s economy and Western oil companies eyeing investment, Syrian security remains an issue. This was demonstrated this week by fresh violence between state security forces and armed Druze groups, which remain in control of the southern province of Sweida. In June, Claudio Cordone, the UN deputy special envoy for Syria, told the Security Council there had been no progress on the implementation of a Syrian government-led, internationally backed road map that was launched in September 2025 with the aim of repairing relations and reintegrating the Druze community into wider Syrian society. There have been previous attempts to bring the Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline back into operation, which were ultimately frustrated by regional tensions. In 2009, the Iraqi prime minister at the time, Nouri Al-Maliki, held talks with a group of Russian companies interested in repairing it. In 2011, the Syrian oil ministry announced that an agreement had been reached with Iraq that would see the original pipeline repaired and three new ones built, designed to carry heavy and light oil and natural gas. Both of these plans came to nothing. The success of the latest Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline project also hangs in large part on improving relations between Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government in Irbil. Cyril Widdershoven, a senior maritime, energy and geopolitical analyst at Blue Water Strategy, told Arab News that the Ministry of Oil “has become the centerpiece of Baghdad’s broader state-building project,” and the new Iraqi leadership is keenly aware that “continued political fragmentation translates directly into lost revenues.” But John Calabrese, a non-resident senior fellow at the Middle East Institute who teaches international relations at the American University in Washington, told Arab News that, so far, “the evidence points to continued friction.” He continued: “In March, with Iraq’s exports severely constrained and Baghdad accusing Irbil of violating constitutional provisions on oil, the KRG withheld cooperation on restarting Ceyhan pipeline flows until Baghdad lifted a dollar-transfer embargo.” This episode, Calabrese added, “is instructive: even during a national emergency, Irbil used its leverage to press its own demands. It’s hard for me to see a ‘breakthrough’ as being imminent.” Regardless, the Iraqi government appears determined to press ahead with the development of a network of pipelines designed to end reliance on the Strait of Hormuz for good. Iraq already exports some oil overland through Turkiye, although the history of this Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline also illustrates the potential vulnerability of such schemes to geopolitical storms. The first of two parallel pipelines, running more than 970 kilometers to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, was completed in 1976. The second pipeline was added in 1987, providing a total capacity of about 1.5 million barrels a day. But between 1990 and 2006 the flow of oil was often interrupted by conflicts in the region, during which the pipeline was repeatedly attacked and damaged. In March 2023, it was shut down during an arbitration dispute between Iraq and Turkiye, and it took two years for the issue to be resolved and oil to start flowing again. The decades-old operating agreement between the two countries lapsed on July 27. But on Aug. 1, Ankara and Baghdad signed a one-year extension and announced that work was under way on a new long-term agreement for the use of the pipeline. Currently, the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline is operating at about 50 percent of its capacity but Ankara is in talks with Baghdad to extend it to Iraq’s southern oilfields. Iraq was on course to modernize and expand its oil industry before the outbreak of the Iran war at the end of February. “There was concrete progress,” said Calabrese. “Iraq had signed TotalEnergies’ $27 billion ‘megadeal’ (to boost Iraq’s oil, gas and power production and reduce imports from Iran), a BP MoU to rehabilitate four northern Kirkuk fields, and an $8 billion Fao refinery contract (with state-owned China National Chemical Engineering company). “It had also launched 29 new oil and gas projects through two licensing rounds, and the Kurdistan-Ceyhan pipeline had just resumed operations last September after a two-and-a-half-year arbitration dispute.” The conflict between the US and Iran, he said, “has complicated matters. Iraq was already facing delays before the war due to political dysfunction, budget stalemates, and investor concerns about the terms Iraq was offering, but Iraq was on course.” Some reports have suggested the revival of the Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline could take as long as four years to complete, at an estimated cost of $15 billion. “That means it would most definitely not be a solution to the current crisis,” said Calabrese. “But it is a genuine long-term hedge against future Hormuz risk.” Widdershoven agrees. Critics who complain such projects will take years to complete are missing the point, he said, because “there is a clear need to find additional outlets which are not constrained by Hormuz or the KRG issue, and both of these issues will not disappear in the next 25 years.” Baghdad appears to see pipelines as the way forward. Last year, work began on the first phase of a proposed pipeline that would stretch more than 1,800 kilometers and link Iraq’s southern oilfields to Aqaba on Jordan’s Red Sea coast. Construction is under way on the Basra-Haditha section, which is designed to carry up to 2.5 million barrels of crude a day when complete. The proposed second phase, from Haditha to Aqaba, would extend the pipeline and transport up to 1 million barrels a day. The fresh urgency was emphasized on July 3, when Al-Zaidi met a Jordanian ministerial delegation amid discussions on speeding up completion of the project, for which the go-ahead was given in 2022. There has also been talk of reopening another pipeline. The Kirkuk-Tripoli pipeline, which carried oil over 928 kilometers to the Lebanese port, via Syria, was built in the early 1930s. It has been mothballed since 1984, when Syria shut it down in support of Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war. Three weeks ago, an Iraqi delegation arrived in Beirut to discuss reviving the pipeline. And yet, while the international backing and financing for all these projects appears to be available, security remains the one uncontrollable variable. The history of another long-defunct Iraq pipeline illustrates the perils of such transnational enterprises in a region that has been troubled by conflict for generations. The Kirkuk-Haifa pipeline, built by the Iraq Petroleum Company in the early 1930s, carried oil to Haifa on the Mediterranean coast in what was then British-controlled Palestine. As tensions flared between Arabs and Jewish settlers, both sides found cause to attack and sabotage the pipeline. Oil finally ceased to flow for good with the creation of Israel in 1948 and the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli war.