Fresh from a fruitless military intervention in Idlib, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has pitched a proposal to Moscow to strip the Syrian Kurds of oil revenues and use the money to finance Turkish construction projects in Syria. 

At his March 5 meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Erdogan agreed to a deal that preserves the Syrian army’s gains in Idlib since January and calls for a security corridor stretching to a depth of 6 kilometers (about 4 miles) on either side of the key M4 highway. He has since revealed some intriguing details about his talks in Moscow.

Speaking to a group of journalists earlier this week, Erdogan said he had made a proposal to Putin to remove the control of oilfields in Qamishli and Deir ez-Zor from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which Ankara views as a terrorist group, and use oil revenues to finance Turkey’s construction of housing projects in northern Syria. 

“Qamishli is a place with oil reserves. So is Deir ez-Zor. Terrorists are exploiting the resources there. America has plans over the place and Putin has a plan over Qamishli,” Erdogan told journalists accompanying him on a flight back from Brussels. He continued, “I proposed Putin this: With the help of oil revenues generated there, we could assume the construction side, if you extend support in terms of financing. Let’s bring ruined Syria to its feet. And Putin said that this could be possible. I could make the same proposal to [US President Donald] Trump. Thanks to those resources, we have the possibility to reconstruct Syria instead of [letting] terrorists benefit from them.”