The US tacitly abandons the original IMEC; replaces Israel with Syria

A pipeline deal in Washington and Syria's delisting quietly redraw the region's route to Europe through Iraq and Syria, cutting Israel out at both ends.

Iraq’s prime minister arrives at the White House next week to sign an agreement reviving the Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline, the 800km line from northern Iraq to Syria’s Mediterranean coast, shut in the 1980s and finished off by the 2003 invasion. A US investment firm will fund and manage the rebuild, an American oil major and a Qatari company are attached, and Syria’s foreign minister flies in for the ceremony. Days earlier Washington moved to strike Syria from the state sponsors of terrorism list it had held since 1979. The timing is no accident. The pipeline is the American layer of a corridor architecture that the Gulf states and Turkey have spent the past year building through Iraq and Syria, and the visible end of a reallocation that has been under way since the war. The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, IMEC, assigned the region’s outlet to Europe to Israel through the port of Haifa. The routes now being financed run through Syria and Iraq, and Israel is left out of every layer. Nobody will announce that IMEC is dead, but the capital has started to move accordingly.

The corridor that never had a chance

IMEC was announced at the G20 in New Delhi on 9 September 2023 as the American answer to the Belt and Road, a 4,800km multimodal route running Indian goods by sea to Khalifa Port, by rail across Saudi Arabia and Jordan to Haifa, and onward to Europe, with a hydrogen pipeline, an electricity interconnector and a data cable running alongside. The signatures on the memorandum belonged to India, the US, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, France, Germany, Italy and the European Commission. The three states the route physically depends on, Jordan, Israel and Greece, signed nothing. Jordan, the mandatory transit country, was listed only as an anticipated future signatory.