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Listen to the full episode of On the Middle East with Amberin Zaman here: https://www.al-monitor.com/podcasts/dont-blame-pkk-all-kurds-losses-syria-says-kurdish-expert-aliza-marcus

The Syrian Transitional Government (STG) has in recent months increasingly framed Syria’s geography as a strategic asset, promoting the country as a potential alternative corridor for energy and trade flows between the Gulf and Europe. This vision draws on Syria’s central location between regional markets. However, the rapid elevation of this narrative risks overstating current capacities.

Syria lacks rehabilitated pipelines, modernized ports, functional railways, a stable electricity grid, and the institutional and security conditions required to sustain such a role. At the same time, the country continues to struggle to meet its own domestic energy needs, placing additional pressure on already limited resources.

>The idea of Syria as an energy and trade corridor gained renewed traction in the context of the recent escalation around the Strait of Hormuz

Far from offering a stable alternative, the proposed corridors would remain deeply exposed to regional rivalries involving Turkey, the Gulf states, Iran, Israel, China and the European Union, raising fundamental questions about the feasibility of transforming geographic potential into operational reality in the near term.

The idea of Syria as an energy and trade corridor gained renewed traction in the context of the recent escalation around the Strait of Hormuz, which exposed the vulnerability of global energy flows. The disruption of maritime traffic through the strait triggered a major energy shock, pushing producers and consumers to reconsider alternative routes. In this context, policy discussions in Washington and regional capitals began to revisit longstanding proposals to transform Syria into a land based corridor capable of linking Gulf and Iraqi energy resources to Mediterranean ports and European markets.

This renewed interest was not limited to technical feasibility but was driven by a broader strategic logic that seeks to reduce dependence on vulnerable maritime chokepoints by developing overland infrastructure, including pipelines and transport corridors.

The renewed discourse on Syria as a regional energy and trade hub draws on a dense map of existing and proposed corridor projects that position the country at the intersection of multiple competing regional visions. Among the most frequently cited is the Qatar-Turkey pipeline, to transport Gulf gas to Europe via Syria and Turkey, alongside the rehabilitation and expansion of the Arab Gas Pipeline linking Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and potentially Lebanon and Turkey. Iraq also figures prominently through proposals to revive the Kirkuk-Baniyas oil pipeline.

Beyond these individual projects, broader integrative frameworks have been revived or rebranded, including the Four Seas Project, which seeks to connect the Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caspian, and Gulf basins, and its proposed articulation with the “4+1” format involving regional actors.

Syria is also increasingly referenced within broader transnational corridor strategies, including Iraq’s Development Corridor, the India Middle East Europe Economic Corridor, and China’s Belt and Road Initiative, embedding it in competing regional projects. Together, these projects outline overlapping visions of how energy flows could be redirected across Syrian territory.

>Syria’s infrastructure remains structurally unfit to sustain the role of a regional energy and trade hub

The central limitation of this narrative lies in the condition of Syria’s infrastructure, which remains structurally unfit to sustain the role of a regional energy and trade hub in the short to medium term. While recent policy discussions emphasize geography and connectivity, they consistently underestimate the scale of reconstruction required across transport and energy systems.

Syria’s ports, including Latakia and Tartous, require extensive modernization to handle increased cargo volumes, improve container capacity, and meet international logistics standards. Similarly, the railway network is largely outdated, fragmented, and in many segments non-operational, requiring full rehabilitation rather than incremental repair. Road corridors, border crossings, and pipeline networks also require large scale rehabilitation, further constraining the feasibility of sustained overland transit.

>The gap between the political narrative of connectivity and the material reality of infrastructure remains one of the most significant obstacles.

In northeastern Syria, the situation is even more acute, with reports indicating that more than 1000 km of network infrastructure, including pipelines and associated facilities, require replacement or major rehabilitation before any meaningful increase in production or transit capacity can be achieved. The cumulative effect of these deficits is not merely a delay in implementation, but a structural constraint on the feasibility of the hub model itself. In this context, the gap between the political narrative of connectivity and the material reality of infrastructure remains one of the most significant obstacles to Syria’s repositioning as a regional energy corridor.

>To position Syria as a land-based alternative to the Strait of Hormuz is framed to reduce exposure to maritime chokepoints. In practice, it does not eliminate vulnerability but redistributes it.

The ambition to position Syria as a regional energy corridor is further complicated by a fundamental domestic contradiction. The country is simultaneously presented as a future transit hub for oil and gas while it continues to struggle to secure stable and affordable energy. At the same time, the electricity sector remains under severe strain. Despite ongoing efforts to rehabilitate key generation facilities, including projects to restore capacity at Deir Ali and Jandar power plants, the overall system continues to face chronic shortages. In parallel, the government has implemented significant tariff increases transferring part of the financial burden of the crisis onto consumers and businesses.

The growing number of investment announcements in Syria’s energy sector is often presented as evidence that the country is already moving toward a hub function. In practice, however, these developments – including offshore exploration initiatives – signal renewed interest rather than an operational transformation. Recent Iraqi fuel shipments transported by tanker to Baniyas illustrate this transitional phase, relying on road logistics rather than pipelines and effectively serving as a test of operational readiness.

Investment interest is real but it remains contingent on political stability, regulatory clarity, security guarantees, and the rehabilitation of basic infrastructure. This momentum reflects preliminary positioning for future opportunities, rather than demonstrating that Syria has already acquired the capacity to function as a regional energy hub.

The ambition to position Syria as a land-based alternative to the Strait of Hormuz is framed to reduce exposure to maritime chokepoints. In practice, it does not eliminate vulnerability but redistributes it across land corridors in a highly contested region. Any corridor crossing Syrian territory would depend on a fragile combination of internal stabilization, external guarantees, and sustained coordination among actors whose interests are often divergent. Rather than a single controlled route, the Syrian space remains fragmented, with overlapping zones of influence and unresolved governance questions that directly affect the security and predictability of transit infrastructure.

From the perspective of external powers, proposals to integrate Syria into regional energy transit systems are also tied to broader strategic objectives. Such initiatives are linked to efforts to reshape regional energy routes, limit the influence of adversarial actors, and reconfigure alliances. This further politicizes infrastructure projects, making them dependent on shifting geopolitical calculations rather than purely economic logic. As a result, the notion of bypassing Hormuz through Syrian corridors replaces one form of strategic exposure with another, moving the locus of risk from maritime disruption to land based instability, political fragmentation, and regional competition.

The current debate on Syria’s future as an energy and trade hub reflects both geopolitical opportunity and domestic ambition, but also reveals a persistent gap between narrative and capacity. The country’s geographic position, combined with renewed regional and international interest, provides a plausible foundation for a future role in transregional connectivity. However, the scale of infrastructure degradation, the persistence of domestic energy shortages, and the exposure to complex geopolitical rivalries continue to limit the feasibility of this transformation in the short term.

In this context, Syria may gradually reemerge as a partial corridor within specific projects and routes over the longer term, though it is unlikely to function as a near-term alternative to the Strait of Hormuz. The current discourse appears as a strategic narrative aimed at mobilizing investment, consolidating political legitimacy, and re positioning Syria within evolving regional dynamics.

--

Mazen Ezzi is a journalist and researcher specialized in Syria’s contemporary political and social dynamics. His work focuses on the emergence of new local actors, transformations of social order, and evolving governmental and security structures. He is the editor of the Housing, Land and Property section at The Syria Report.

https://www.theamargi.com/posts/ruined-infrastructure-limits-syrias-capacity-as-hormuz-alternative

The Pentagon’s budget request for next year proposes to end U.S. training and weapons support for the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs entirely. The line is worth $61 million this year. Next year it goes to zero. What remains is a medical sustainment allocation of just over $1 million. Federal Iraqi forces and Syria stay funded, and for 2027, Lebanon and Jordan enter the same counter-ISIS fund for the first time. A Sulaimani security unit in the PUK sphere sees its allocation increase.

Context: Pentagon support for the Peshmerga as a named, standalone force has no history before the ISIS war. The channel opened as a wartime emergency: around $354 million in 2015, $415 million in 2016, then roughly $290 to $365 million through the end of the decade. After the territorial defeat of ISIS, the numbers declined steadily, but the channel remained. Around $257 million in 2022, $207 million in 2023, $164 million in 2024, $139 million in 2025, $77 million this year. Next year’s request takes it to $1.35 million. The decline across the past five years was gradual. The move from $77 million to near-zero is not.

Analysis: Washington has a clean explanation for the cut, and it is not wrong, exactly. The U.S.-KRG memorandum of understanding signed in September 2022 ran for four years and expired this past September. Peshmerga stipends had already ended before that, with Washington expecting Baghdad to absorb the salary burden. Next year’s request follows that window without a renewal in place.

The problem with that explanation is the training and equipment line. Stipends ending makes sense within the MOU frame. A $61 million equipment line going to zero does not follow automatically from an MOU expiring. Washington had options: extend the memorandum, negotiate a revised version, or route continued support through a different mechanism. It has done exactly that in harder political circumstances elsewhere. In Syria, the SDF’s territorial control has largely collapsed, former SDF elements have nominally integrated into a new Syrian security structure, and the political environment has transformed entirely. U.S. funding for Syria nonetheless stays at $130 million, almost exactly where it was. While the formula changed, the money did not. Therefore, there is likely more to the Peshmarga weapons delivery cut when you look at the bigger picture and the geopolitical circumstances.

The money itself is also not the point. Sixty million dollars is not a significant sum in U.S. defense terms – a single media channel in the Kurdistan Region might run a comparable annual budget. What the line represents is access: to American weapons, to equipment contracts, to the institutional recognition that a force sits inside the U.S. security architecture, and losing it means losing that status, not just the cash. The funds appear to have been redirected toward Lebanon and Jordan, which partly explains the cut when placed in its wider context. Lebanon enters the counter-ISIS fund for the first time, framed around the Lebanese Armed Forces, border security, and special operations capacity. Jordan enters for the first time, explicitly described as a platform for regional missions as the U.S. reduces its direct footprint in Syria and the broader Levant. Counter-ISIS is the statutory label, but the regional design being built underneath it is about anti-Iran pressure and a consolidation of U.S. support behind central governments and state-recognized forces – which is also why Syria’s funding remains, now framed around units integrated or being integrated into the new Syrian army.

The KDP’s position makes the cut harder to read as purely bureaucratic, as simple as the MoU expiring on schedule. During the February 2026 war between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, there was a plan, or at minimum a serious American and Israeli interest, in activating Iranian Kurdish opposition factions for cross-border operations from Iraq’s Kurdistan Region. The plan appears to have collapsed at the last minute. Kurdish factions denied receiving material support, denied planning imminent action, and the KRG publicly rejected any role in expanding the conflict into Iranian territory. Trump said publicly that the U.S. had sent weapons to Kurdish intermediaries for Iranian protesters and that those weapons never reached them, adding that there would be consequences. Kurdish groups denied the framing. The details remain contested, but placed alongside the sequence of events that follows, the picture becomes harder to read as coincidence.

In addition to the weapons cut, the Justice Department has named Mansour Barzani explicitly in a public statement, alleging he was implicated in a bribery and money laundering scheme involving fuel delivery contracts to U.S. troops in Erbil. What makes the timing notable is that the conduct alleged dates to 2016 to 2020 — meaning the underlying events are at least five years old. Cases like this take years to build, and the law moves on its own timeline. What is new is the decision to name him publicly, now, placing the most senior Barzani military figure inside a U.S. legal case tied to contracts for American forces at precisely the moment the broader MoPA channel is being cut.

The political sequence in Baghdad reinforces the same reading. The KDP boycotted the Iraqi presidential session. Parliament went ahead anyway. A PUK-affiliated candidate, Nizar Amedi, was elected president over a field that included the KDP-backed candidate Fuad Hussein. Most factions attended within days despite the KDP’s stated boycott. The U.S. ambassador visited the new president. Amedi tasked Ali Zaidi with forming a government, and Washington signaled engagement. The KDP position was treated as inconvenient rather than essential.

Even more noteworthy is that in the same budget, Sulaymaniyah SWAT, a PUK-linked special operations unit, sees its allocation rise from $4 million to roughly $5 million. If the Peshmerga cut were simply about the ISIS mission winding down or an MOU expiring, that line would also be gone. The Pentagon frames it as a law-enforcement partner recognized by Baghdad and working directly with U.S. special operations forces. Its actual political location is not obscure to anyone following Kurdish security politics: Sulaymaniyah Asayish, PUK sphere, direct SOF integration.

None of this proves a single coordinated decision to punish the KDP. What it shows is a pattern the official ISIS explanation does not account for. It is worth noting that both the PUK, via its Sulaymaniyah SWAT force, and SDF fighters, though named as “former SDF fighters”, remain funded to varying degrees by Washington, leaving KDP-linked forces as the only Kurdish faction entirely out. And beyond the intra-Kurdish signalling, the nature of the rerouting does suggest a transition toward a different regional security framework, one channelled more directly through state actors, strengthening them from within and positioning them to counter Iranian influence as much as to counter ISIS.

https://thenationalcontext.com/pentagon-peshmerga-funding-cut-2027/

The Pentagon’s budget request for next year proposes to end U.S. training and weapons support for the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs entirely. The line is worth $61 million this year. Next year it goes to zero. What remains is a medical sustainment allocation of just over $1 million. Federal Iraqi forces and Syria stay funded, and for 2027, Lebanon and Jordan enter the same counter-ISIS fund for the first time. A Sulaimani security unit in the PUK sphere sees its allocation increase.

Context: Pentagon support for the Peshmerga as a named, standalone force has no history before the ISIS war. The channel opened as a wartime emergency: around $354 million in 2015, $415 million in 2016, then roughly $290 to $365 million through the end of the decade. After the territorial defeat of ISIS, the numbers declined steadily, but the channel remained. Around $257 million in 2022, $207 million in 2023, $164 million in 2024, $139 million in 2025, $77 million this year. Next year’s request takes it to $1.35 million. The decline across the past five years was gradual. The move from $77 million to near-zero is not.

Analysis: Washington has a clean explanation for the cut, and it is not wrong, exactly. The U.S.-KRG memorandum of understanding signed in September 2022 ran for four years and expired this past September. Peshmerga stipends had already ended before that, with Washington expecting Baghdad to absorb the salary burden. Next year’s request follows that window without a renewal in place.

The problem with that explanation is the training and equipment line. Stipends ending makes sense within the MOU frame. A $61 million equipment line going to zero does not follow automatically from an MOU expiring. Washington had options: extend the memorandum, negotiate a revised version, or route continued support through a different mechanism. It has done exactly that in harder political circumstances elsewhere. In Syria, the SDF’s territorial control has largely collapsed, former SDF elements have nominally integrated into a new Syrian security structure, and the political environment has transformed entirely. U.S. funding for Syria nonetheless stays at $130 million, almost exactly where it was. While the formula changed, the money did not. Therefore, there is likely more to the Peshmarga weapons delivery cut when you look at the bigger picture and the geopolitical circumstances.

The money itself is also not the point. Sixty million dollars is not a significant sum in U.S. defense terms – a single media channel in the Kurdistan Region might run a comparable annual budget. What the line represents is access: to American weapons, to equipment contracts, to the institutional recognition that a force sits inside the U.S. security architecture, and losing it means losing that status, not just the cash. The funds appear to have been redirected toward Lebanon and Jordan, which partly explains the cut when placed in its wider context. Lebanon enters the counter-ISIS fund for the first time, framed around the Lebanese Armed Forces, border security, and special operations capacity. Jordan enters for the first time, explicitly described as a platform for regional missions as the U.S. reduces its direct footprint in Syria and the broader Levant. Counter-ISIS is the statutory label, but the regional design being built underneath it is about anti-Iran pressure and a consolidation of U.S. support behind central governments and state-recognized forces – which is also why Syria’s funding remains, now framed around units integrated or being integrated into the new Syrian army.

The KDP’s position makes the cut harder to read as purely bureaucratic, as simple as the MoU expiring on schedule. During the February 2026 war between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, there was a plan, or at minimum a serious American and Israeli interest, in activating Iranian Kurdish opposition factions for cross-border operations from Iraq’s Kurdistan Region. The plan appears to have collapsed at the last minute. Kurdish factions denied receiving material support, denied planning imminent action, and the KRG publicly rejected any role in expanding the conflict into Iranian territory. Trump said publicly that the U.S. had sent weapons to Kurdish intermediaries for Iranian protesters and that those weapons never reached them, adding that there would be consequences. Kurdish groups denied the framing. The details remain contested, but placed alongside the sequence of events that follows, the picture becomes harder to read as coincidence.

In addition to the weapons cut, the Justice Department has named Mansour Barzani explicitly in a public statement, alleging he was implicated in a bribery and money laundering scheme involving fuel delivery contracts to U.S. troops in Erbil. What makes the timing notable is that the conduct alleged dates to 2016 to 2020 — meaning the underlying events are at least five years old. Cases like this take years to build, and the law moves on its own timeline. What is new is the decision to name him publicly, now, placing the most senior Barzani military figure inside a U.S. legal case tied to contracts for American forces at precisely the moment the broader MoPA channel is being cut.

The political sequence in Baghdad reinforces the same reading. The KDP boycotted the Iraqi presidential session. Parliament went ahead anyway. A PUK-affiliated candidate, Nizar Amedi, was elected president over a field that included the KDP-backed candidate Fuad Hussein. Most factions attended within days despite the KDP’s stated boycott. The U.S. ambassador visited the new president. Amedi tasked Ali Zaidi with forming a government, and Washington signaled engagement. The KDP position was treated as inconvenient rather than essential.

Even more noteworthy is that in the same budget, Sulaymaniyah SWAT, a PUK-linked special operations unit, sees its allocation rise from $4 million to roughly $5 million. If the Peshmerga cut were simply about the ISIS mission winding down or an MOU expiring, that line would also be gone. The Pentagon frames it as a law-enforcement partner recognized by Baghdad and working directly with U.S. special operations forces. Its actual political location is not obscure to anyone following Kurdish security politics: Sulaymaniyah Asayish, PUK sphere, direct SOF integration.

None of this proves a single coordinated decision to punish the KDP. What it shows is a pattern the official ISIS explanation does not account for. It is worth noting that both the PUK, via its Sulaymaniyah SWAT force, and SDF fighters, though named as “former SDF fighters”, remain funded to varying degrees by Washington, leaving KDP-linked forces as the only Kurdish faction entirely out. And beyond the intra-Kurdish signalling, the nature of the rerouting does suggest a transition toward a different regional security framework, one channelled more directly through state actors, strengthening them from within and positioning them to counter Iranian influence as much as to counter ISIS.

https://thenationalcontext.com/pentagon-peshmerga-funding-cut-2027/

The Pentagon’s budget request for next year proposes to end U.S. training and weapons support for the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs entirely. The line is worth $61 million this year. Next year it goes to zero. What remains is a medical sustainment allocation of just over $1 million. Federal Iraqi forces and Syria stay funded, and for 2027, Lebanon and Jordan enter the same counter-ISIS fund for the first time. A Sulaimani security unit in the PUK sphere sees its allocation increase.

Context: Pentagon support for the Peshmerga as a named, standalone force has no history before the ISIS war. The channel opened as a wartime emergency: around $354 million in 2015, $415 million in 2016, then roughly $290 to $365 million through the end of the decade. After the territorial defeat of ISIS, the numbers declined steadily, but the channel remained. Around $257 million in 2022, $207 million in 2023, $164 million in 2024, $139 million in 2025, $77 million this year. Next year’s request takes it to $1.35 million. The decline across the past five years was gradual. The move from $77 million to near-zero is not.

Analysis: Washington has a clean explanation for the cut, and it is not wrong, exactly. The U.S.-KRG memorandum of understanding signed in September 2022 ran for four years and expired this past September. Peshmerga stipends had already ended before that, with Washington expecting Baghdad to absorb the salary burden. Next year’s request follows that window without a renewal in place.

The problem with that explanation is the training and equipment line. Stipends ending makes sense within the MOU frame. A $61 million equipment line going to zero does not follow automatically from an MOU expiring. Washington had options: extend the memorandum, negotiate a revised version, or route continued support through a different mechanism. It has done exactly that in harder political circumstances elsewhere. In Syria, the SDF’s territorial control has largely collapsed, former SDF elements have nominally integrated into a new Syrian security structure, and the political environment has transformed entirely. U.S. funding for Syria nonetheless stays at $130 million, almost exactly where it was. While the formula changed, the money did not. Therefore, there is likely more to the Peshmarga weapons delivery cut when you look at the bigger picture and the geopolitical circumstances.

The money itself is also not the point. Sixty million dollars is not a significant sum in U.S. defense terms – a single media channel in the Kurdistan Region might run a comparable annual budget. What the line represents is access: to American weapons, to equipment contracts, to the institutional recognition that a force sits inside the U.S. security architecture, and losing it means losing that status, not just the cash. The funds appear to have been redirected toward Lebanon and Jordan, which partly explains the cut when placed in its wider context. Lebanon enters the counter-ISIS fund for the first time, framed around the Lebanese Armed Forces, border security, and special operations capacity. Jordan enters for the first time, explicitly described as a platform for regional missions as the U.S. reduces its direct footprint in Syria and the broader Levant. Counter-ISIS is the statutory label, but the regional design being built underneath it is about anti-Iran pressure and a consolidation of U.S. support behind central governments and state-recognized forces – which is also why Syria’s funding remains, now framed around units integrated or being integrated into the new Syrian army.

The KDP’s position makes the cut harder to read as purely bureaucratic, as simple as the MoU expiring on schedule. During the February 2026 war between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, there was a plan, or at minimum a serious American and Israeli interest, in activating Iranian Kurdish opposition factions for cross-border operations from Iraq’s Kurdistan Region. The plan appears to have collapsed at the last minute. Kurdish factions denied receiving material support, denied planning imminent action, and the KRG publicly rejected any role in expanding the conflict into Iranian territory. Trump said publicly that the U.S. had sent weapons to Kurdish intermediaries for Iranian protesters and that those weapons never reached them, adding that there would be consequences. Kurdish groups denied the framing. The details remain contested, but placed alongside the sequence of events that follows, the picture becomes harder to read as coincidence.

In addition to the weapons cut, the Justice Department has named Mansour Barzani explicitly in a public statement, alleging he was implicated in a bribery and money laundering scheme involving fuel delivery contracts to U.S. troops in Erbil. What makes the timing notable is that the conduct alleged dates to 2016 to 2020 — meaning the underlying events are at least five years old. Cases like this take years to build, and the law moves on its own timeline. What is new is the decision to name him publicly, now, placing the most senior Barzani military figure inside a U.S. legal case tied to contracts for American forces at precisely the moment the broader MoPA channel is being cut.

The political sequence in Baghdad reinforces the same reading. The KDP boycotted the Iraqi presidential session. Parliament went ahead anyway. A PUK-affiliated candidate, Nizar Amedi, was elected president over a field that included the KDP-backed candidate Fuad Hussein. Most factions attended within days despite the KDP’s stated boycott. The U.S. ambassador visited the new president. Amedi tasked Ali Zaidi with forming a government, and Washington signaled engagement. The KDP position was treated as inconvenient rather than essential.

Even more noteworthy is that in the same budget, Sulaymaniyah SWAT, a PUK-linked special operations unit, sees its allocation rise from $4 million to roughly $5 million. If the Peshmerga cut were simply about the ISIS mission winding down or an MOU expiring, that line would also be gone. The Pentagon frames it as a law-enforcement partner recognized by Baghdad and working directly with U.S. special operations forces. Its actual political location is not obscure to anyone following Kurdish security politics: Sulaymaniyah Asayish, PUK sphere, direct SOF integration.

None of this proves a single coordinated decision to punish the KDP. What it shows is a pattern the official ISIS explanation does not account for. It is worth noting that both the PUK, via its Sulaymaniyah SWAT force, and SDF fighters, though named as “former SDF fighters”, remain funded to varying degrees by Washington, leaving KDP-linked forces as the only Kurdish faction entirely out. And beyond the intra-Kurdish signalling, the nature of the rerouting does suggest a transition toward a different regional security framework, one channelled more directly through state actors, strengthening them from within and positioning them to counter Iranian influence as much as to counter ISIS.

https://thenationalcontext.com/pentagon-peshmerga-funding-cut-2027/

Syria's deputy defense minister for the eastern region says four brigades have been formally incorporated into the national army, but warns that the politicization of Kurdish detainee files is "unacceptable" and demands their immediate release.