Published December 30, 2023
On Friday Iraq broke ground on 30,000 housing units near Baghdad, as part of a $2 billion project in partnership with Chinese firms to build five new cities across Iraq, Bloomberg has reported.
The government of Prime Minister Mohammad Shia al-Sudani is seeking to build 250,000 to 300,000 housing units for poor and middle-class families. The new city on the outskirts of Baghdad will include universities, commercial centers, schools and health centers and should be completed in four to five years.
Contracts to build the housing units were awarded to East China Engineering Science and Technology Co., Ltd. and China National Chemical Engineering Co., Ltd along with their Iraqi partner Shams al-Binaa.
Contracts to build four more cities are expected to be awarded soon and another 10 will be announced next year, including in Karbala, Anbar, Nineveh and Babel governorates.
Chinese firms have increased their presence in Iraq in recent years, in part due to a deal between Baghdad and Beijing.
In 2019, Iraq signed a 20-year contract, agreeing to supply Chinese firms with 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil, with the revenue earmarked for funding various development projects in Iraq undertaken by Chinese firms.
Following the deal, Chinese firms built 1,000 schools, developed the Nasiriya city airport, erected power plants, and completed several other infrastructure projects.
China has accelerated its investment in Iraq and other West Asian nations as part of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) announced in 2013.
China-built largest thermal power plant in Iraq has generated nearly 150 billion kwh of electricity to date. At the peak of its power generation, it ensured 70% of the power supply in the capital Baghdad while providing the entire country with 30% of its power needs.
🇨🇳🤝🇮🇶 pic.twitter.com/m9NfmQDKcY— ShanghaiPanda (@thinking_panda) December 12, 2023
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SOURCE: www.zerohedge.com
RELATED: Chinese Construction Firms Begin Work on $2 Billion New City in Iraq
The new city will include universities, commercial centers, schools and health centers. Photo: Bloomberg
Published December 29, 2023
(Bloomberg) — Iraq broke ground Wednesday on a $2 billion project to build a residential city outside of Baghdad, with two Chinese firms starting construction on 30,000 housing units.
The project is part of plan to construct five cities across Iraq. Four more are expected to be awarded soon and another 10 will be announced next year. Contracts were awarded to East China Engineering Science and Technology Co. Ltd. and China National Chemical Engineering Co. Ltd., along with their Iraqi partner Shams Al-Binaa. Other new cities to be constructed are in Kerbala, Anbar, Nineveh and Babel provinces.
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SOURCE: www.caixinglobal.com
RELATED: Iraq Forges Ahead On Greater Integration With China
Published December 28, 2023
- Iraq-China Framework Agreement’ signed in December 2021, will enable China to complete its long-term strategy of sequestrating all of Iraq’s key oil, gas, and petrochemical assets to its own ends, as it sees fit.
- Using Russia’s playbook from Kurdistan, China at the beginning of 2021 firstly used state proxy, Zhenhua Oil, to agree a US$2 billion five–year prepayment oil supply deal.
- It is entirely legal for oil companies to deploy whatever security forces they think necessary to protect their valuable assets on the ground in whichever country they operate.
Given the festive time of year, it is perhaps fitting that senior Iraqi politicians are again pushing for the full activation of the ‘Iraq-China Framework Agreement’, which is akin to turkeys voting for Christmas. The Agreement, signed in December 2021, will enable China to complete its long-term strategy of sequestrating all of Iraq’s key oil, gas, and petrochemical assets to its own ends, as it sees fit. The similarly all-encompassing ‘Iran-China 25-Year Comprehensive Cooperation Agreement’ did exactly that with neighbouring Iran, as first revealed anywhere in the world in my 3 September 2019 article on the subject and analysed in full in my new book on the new global oil market order. In the mawkish parlance of today’s reality television programmes, Beijing’s ‘journey’ to turn Iran and Iraq effectively into client states has been long, and it has learned a lot about itself in the process, but ultimately it has all been worth it.
In Iraq’s case, it all truly began for China at the beginning of 2021, when Beijing used the same three-pronged strategy in the south of Iraq that Russia had used toward the end of 2017 to gain control over all the major oil and gas assets in Iraq’s northern semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan, as also analysed in full in my new book. Following the political chaos that came after that region’s massive vote in favour of full independence from Iraq, the Kremlin’s corporate oil proxy, Rosneft, firstly provided the government of Iraqi Kurdistan with US$1.5 billion in financing through a three-to-five-year prepayment oil supply deal. Second, it took an 80 percent working interest in five potentially major oil blocks in the Kurdistan region together with corollary investment and technical, technology, and equipment assistance. And third, it established 60 percent ownership of the vital Iraqi Kurdistan oil pipeline into southern Europe’s port of Ceyhan in Turkey by dint of a commitment to invest US$1.8 billion to increase its capacity to one million barrels per day.
Using Russia’s playbook from Kurdistan, China at the beginning of 2021 firstly used state proxy, Zhenhua Oil, to agree a US$2 billion five–year prepayment oil supply deal between the Federal Government of Iraq (FGI) in Baghdad in the south of the country. Underlining once again that China’s oil and gas activities are part its broader colonising plans (President Xi is a great admirer of Great Britain’s use of the East India Company in its own such plans), Zhenhua Oil is a subsidiary of China’s massive defence contractor Norinco. Secondly, discussions began between China and Iraq on expanding the build-up of Beijing’s presence in the country’s oil and gas projects across the south of the country. The takeover by Chinese companies of multiple elements (exploration, development, maintenance, security, and so on) of oil and gas field licences in southern Iraq had been especially prevalent since the unilateral withdrawal of the U.S. from the ‘nuclear deal’ with Iran in May 2018, as also analysed in depth in my new book. China had also formally known from July 2021 that the U.S. would also end its combat mission in Iraq by the end of December that year at the latest, as the Presidential Administration had announced it in advance. And thirdly, as a part of the earlier 25-year agreement with Iran – which holds enormous sway over Iraq, through its political, economic, and military proxies – China had already begun building major logistics links that involved Iraq.
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SOURCE: www.oilprice.com
