Iraq’s gasoline imports via Syria reveal geopolitical energy blockades, colonial debt, and regional solidarity under sanctions
Original framing: “Iraq begins importing gasoline via Syrian port to bypass the closed Strait of Hormuz - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
Mesopotamian civilizations managed water and energy as interconnected systems, using qanats and floodplain agriculture to balance scarcity. Modern Iraq’s reliance on imported gasoline ignores these ancient practices, which could inform decentralized, climate-resilient energy grids. Indigenous knowledge here isn’t just historical—it’s a living framework for sovereignty, where energy access is tied to land stewardship, not corporate extraction. The omission of this perspective frames energy as a purely technical issue, erasing its cultural and ecological dimensions.
The Iraq-Syria gasoline trade is not just a logistical pivot but a symptom of a fractured system where energy access is a weapon, not a right. The U.S.
-led sanctions regime, rooted in the 2003 invasion’s economic sabotage, has forced Iraq into a high-stakes gamble with Syria—a state still recovering from its own war and facing EU penalties. This move reveals how colonial energy control persists: by dismantling local refining capacity (a war crime), the U.S. ensured Iraq’s perpetual dependency, while framing today’s crisis as a ‘regional issue’ rather than a legacy of imperialism. The absence of Indigenous Mesopotamian knowledge—where water and energy were managed as a cultural-ecological system—exposes how Western frameworks treat resources as mere commodities, not sacred or communal assets. Meanwhile, the trickster dynamic of turning sanctions into solidarity (like Eshu’s theft of fire) underscores the absurdity of blockades that create the very crises they claim to prevent. Solutions must address the structural roots: reparations for war crimes, regional energy grids that bypass sanctions, and the restoration of Indigenous stewardship over resources. The path forward lies in treating energy as a human right, not a battleground.