On February 4, the Syrian Petroleum Company signed a memorandum of understanding with Chevron and Qatar’s Power International Holding. The deal was for Syria’s first offshore oil and gas exploration block. “Before the summer, God willing, we will start mobilisation and drilling,” said Youssef Kabalawi, the Syrian company’s chief.
Tom Barrack, the US special envoy for Syria, also chimed in: “America’s greatest footprint all over the world is Chevron … where Chevron goes, America goes.”
The timing was interesting. Weeks prior, on January 13, Syrian government forces drove into Syria’s northeast, seizing cities, dams and, with particular efficiency, the oil and gas fields held for a decade by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
The official line was national reunification, but the map of the advance signals that resources were at the heart of the battle plans.
The Syrian army took the al-Omar oil field, the Conoco gas complex, the Tishreen field and the Tabqa Dam, which powers much of northern Syria. Before the conflict, oil and gas provided over a fifth of Syria’s GDP. After over a decade of chaos, regaining these assets became existential.
For the past year, President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government has been piecing the battered country back together with one hand tied behind its back. A key constraint has been the lack of energy. Under the fallen Bashar al-Assad regime, Syria had become dependent on Iran for an estimated 100,000 barrels of oil per day, but that tap was turned off after Assad’s fall. To break free from external dependency and fuel a real recovery, Sharaa needed control of northern Syria’s hydrocarbons.
The SDF’s autonomous project in the northeast was sitting on the solution. Reports indicate that in early 2025, over 75 percent of the Kurdish-led administration’s revenue came from oil, over $400m financing its civil service and its 85,000 fighters. By capturing the fields, al-Sharaa severed the SDF’s financial lifeline, transferred its assets to the state, and in doing so, rendered the group’s political dissolution inevitable.
The path to this capture was paved by failed politics. A framework deal in March 2025 between Sharaa and SDF commander Mazloum Abdi had promised integration of Kurdish forces and some local autonomy. It stalled for months. Kurdish leaders, including Abdi, hesitated, hoping for better terms or external support, but that delay was a grave miscalculation. By January, Sharaa’s patience had expired.
Damascus moved with confidence, having spent months cultivating ties with the majority-Arab tribes chafing under SDF rule. When the offensive began, this groundwork triggered mass defections and local uprisings, hollowing out the SDF from within its own territory and paving the way for its quick defeat.
The swift collapse of his forces compelled Abdi to accept a new, diminished agreement that dissolved the SDF as a separate army and transferred the oil fields outright to Damascus.
External actors blessed this reordering, not just out of love for Sharaa (though President Trump seems to be his biggest personal fan), but because their interests aligned with a stable, energy-producing Syria.
The United States, the SDF’s former patron, has shifted decisively towards endorsing centralised rule in Syria since the fall of Bashar al-Assad. US Special Envoy and Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack, who previously stated that decentralisation “has never really worked anywhere in this region,” publicly posted on X during the offensive that the SDF’s mission had “largely expired.”
President Donald Trump, in a call with Sharaa, endorsed the campaign in real time, saying he was “very happy” with developments. The statement served as a public withdrawal of American protection for the SDF, the very force Washington had built up over the preceding decade.
The momentum is accelerating. On February 10th, Reuters reported that two Saudi firms (ACWA Power and TAQA) and three US companies (Baker Hughes, Hunt Energy and Argent LNG) are forming a consortium for oil and gas exploration in recently seized northeastern Syria. This deal, following the Chevron signing by days, underscores that the offensive has unlocked an investment rush that is fast transforming Syria into an emerging energy hub.
For Turkey especially, Sharaa’s energy play delivers a huge economic and political windfall. Ankara has long viewed the SDF, an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), as an existential threat on its border. By dismantling the SDF’s autonomous, oil-funded proto-state, Sharaa achieved a core Turkish security objective without requiring Ankara to risk its own troops.
The demise of the SDF strengthens President Erdogan’s hand in domestic negotiations with the PKK (which it considers a terrorist organisation), which are predicated on the group’s regional isolation.
The long-term economic benefits are also compelling. While Turkey provided electricity to parts of northern Syria during the war, and still does, it now eyes a more mutually beneficial partnership. Alongside existing projects such as the gas pipeline from Kilis to Aleppo, Ankara plans to sign an offshore energy exploration deal with Syria in 2026 to “conduct seismic research” off the Syrian coast. Turkey’s Energy Minister, Alparslan Bayraktar added that Turkish companies are poised to lead in rehabilitating Syria’s energy sector.
Reliable energy and revived industry Syria also creates the essential conditions for the eventual return of millions of Syrian refugees hosted in Turkey, another of Ankara’s key objectives.
Osama al-Qadi, first advisor to Syria’s ministry of economy, highlighted how significant it is for the economy that the Syrian government now controls these resources, describing it as “the second wing for the Syrian economy to truly fly within six months to a year.”
The objective, al-Qadi noted, is to boost today’s crippled output of 40,000-80,000 barrels per day to over 500,00 barrels per day. Before Syria’s ruinous war, Syria produced roughly 380,000 barrels, a level that once made Syria a net exporter. Oil and gas sales provided around 20 percent of government revenue and funded a quarter of the state budget.
The new wave of investment, including offshore exploration, opens the possibility of discovering even bigger reserves. In the medium to long term, this could fundamentally transform the nation’s financial prospects.
While the restoration of national unity remains the paramount and publicly stated goal, it is a project fundamentally underwritten by hydrocarbons. Sharaa’s end game was never a federal Syria, it was a centralised energy state.
SDF chief Mazloum Abdi, who had trained and lived in Iraqi Kurdistan, long looked to the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) as a model. The KRG controls its own oil and gas fields, signing its own contracts while maintaining its own Peshmerga army. Abdi no doubt stalled in his negotiations in Damascus because he had a similar arrangement in mind, either direct control of local oil revenue or a guaranteed share for the northeast, along with a distinct Kurdish Corps within the Syrian military. But a KRG-style settlement was never possible in Syria.
Iraq possesses other major oil fields, allowing Baghdad to grudgingly tolerate the KRG’s semi-autonomous control of its own reserves. Syria’s primary wealth, however, is concentrated almost entirely in the northeast, precisely the territory the SDF controlled. For a post-war state desperate for reconstruction capital, leaving this wealth outside the state’s direct control was simply not an option.
This explains why Sharaa granted citizenship to thousands of stateless Kurds (long denied citizenship by the previous Assad regime) and recognised Kurdish as a national language, just as his tanks were rolling onto the oil fields.These were tactical moves intended to decouple the Kurdish people from the SDF leadership.
In doing so, Sharaa neutralised the SDF’s primary reason for existence (protecting Kurdish identity), presenting the seizure of the oil fields as a resource restoration for all Syrians, instead of an attack on Kurds.