A New Opportunity for the Basra-Aqaba Pipeline?
While the Basra-Aqaba pipeline project promises economic, energy, and security benefits for Iraq and Jordan, high costs and political and security risks pose huge feasibility challenges.
Research Associate, AGSIW
Yerevan Saeed is a research associate at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington and a lecturer at the University of Kurdistan Hewler. Saeed is a political analyst who researches and writes on security, political, and energy issues in the Middle East, focusing on Iraq, Turkey, Iran, the Gulf, and the Levant. He has served as White House correspondent for the Kurdish Rudaw TV, and his work has been published in the Washington Institute’s Fikra Forum, the Diplomatic Courier, The New York Times, the London-based Majalla magazine, Rudaw, Global Politician, and several Kurdish newspapers. In addition, he has been interviewed by Voice of America, NPR, CNN, Voice of Russia, and Kurdish television programs and newspapers. From 2009-13, Saeed worked with Stratfor; additionally, he worked for several media outlets, including The New York Times, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, BBC, and The Guardian, as a journalist and translator in Iraq from 2003-07.
Saeed holds a bachelor’s degree in government from the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s degree from Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, with a focus on Middle East studies and international negotiation and conflict resolution. He received his PhD from the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University. He speaks Kurdish and Arabic and has a command of Farsi.
While the Basra-Aqaba pipeline project promises economic, energy, and security benefits for Iraq and Jordan, high costs and political and security risks pose huge feasibility challenges.
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