Attacking Iran: Did US Just Torpedo Israeli Deal For A Base In Azerbaijan?

The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline was officially opened on July 13, 2006 and now transports crude oil 1,760 km (1,090 mi) from the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oil field in the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. The oil is pumped from the Sangachal Terminal close to Baku, via Tbilisi the capital of Georgia, to Ceyhan a port on the south-eastern Mediterranean coast of Turkey. It is the second longest oil pipeline in the world (the longest being the Druzhba pipeline from Russia to central Europe).

The BTC pipeline is expected to make a major contribution to the development of world energy supply with its more than 1 million barrels (160,000 m3) per day capacity. Thanks to this project Turkey is also expected to earn about $300 million annually. Around 15,000 people were employed during the construction of the pipeline which cost $3 billion

Shah Deniz field, discovered in 1999, is one of BP's largest gas field finds in recent decades. The Shah Deniz gas plant at Sangachal Terminal started up in 2007 and transformed Azerbaijan into a major gas producer. Stage 1 of Shah Deniz project is now complete and supplies Europe with 8 bcma of natural gas via the South Caucasus Pipeline. Stage 2 of the Shah Deniz Project has been approved and is being designed.

On September 9, 2011 French energy giant Total S.A. which has been operating in Azerbaijan since 1996, announced a major gas discovery in Absheron gas field offshore 100 km southeast of capital Baku.[7] The field is estimated to have around 300 billion cm of gas[8] subsequently boosting Azerbaijan's gas reserves from 2.2 to 2.5 trillion cm.[9] The find also increased hopes for faster realization of Nabucco pipeline.[10]
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Russia is sending a “temporary detachment” of troops into the southern region of Dagestan, whose border lies about 200 kilometers (124 miles) north of Iran, to combat terrorism, the Interior Ministry said.

“We are talking about a temporary deployment and coordination to prevent and counter terrorism and extremism across the whole territory of Dagestan,” Vyacheslav Makhmudov, a spokesman for the regional Interior Ministry, said from the republic’s capital city, Makhachkala.

About 1,000 troops are being moved from the nearby region of Chechnya to form temporary police units in municipalities with “complicated criminal conditions,” said Magomed Baachilov, the secretary of Dagestan’s state security council. The realignment of forces was ordered by Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliev, with Oleg Kizhayev, a police colonel, named in charge of the ministry detachment in Dagestan, the Interior Ministry’s main directorate for the North Caucasus said on its website today.

The authorities were deploying 20,000 to 25,000 federal troops from Khankala, the main Russian army base in Chechnya, according to reports published in Caucasian Knot, a Moscow-based news and analysis group that tracks the situation in the North and South Caucasus, and the weekly Dagestani publication Chernovik, which cited unidentified local law-enforcement officials. A convoy of armored personnel carriers and military vehicles was seen moving toward southern Dagestan from March 14 to March 17, the reports said.