Turkey will start exporting natural gas from Azerbaijan to Syria this Saturday, the energy minister announced, as Damascus said the imports would go toward electricity production.
Syria’s Islamist authorities, who toppled Bashar al-Assad in December, are seeking to rebuild the country’s infrastructure and economy after almost 14 years of civil war.
The conflict badly damaged Syria’s power infrastructure, leading to cuts that can last for more than 20 hours a day.
“We will start exporting natural gas from Azerbaijan to Aleppo via Kilis”, a province in southernmost Turkey near the Syrian border, Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar said Wednesday.
According to Syrian state news agency SANA, Energy Minister Mohammad al-Bashir confirmed that “from August 2, Syria will begin to receive 3.4 million cubic metres of gas from Azerbaijan” via Turkey.
The gas “will allow the production of around 900 megawatts of electricity, as part of joint cooperation aiming to support the Syrian energy sector”, SANA reported.
Earlier this month, Baku said Azerbaijan would send its gas to Syria as President Ilham Aliyev hosted Damascus’s new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa.
In May, Bashir said Damascus and Ankara had reached a deal for Turkey to supply natural gas to the war-torn country via a pipeline in the north.
Gas-rich Azerbaijan is a historic ally of Turkey which maintains close ties with the Syrian transitional government.
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© Agence France-Presse
