To: c.hinton who wrote (242427 ) 9/20/2007 11:19:38 AM From: Sun Tzu Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 281500 >> iran is trying to extend claims on caspian reserves....in a word stealing... A bit of history is in order. Not too long ago, all of Azerbaijan and Armenia was an Iranian territory before Russian invasion of Iran. There were 3 battles over the region and Russia won 2 out of the three. The local population actually fought hard against the Russian invasion, which is why Stalin had to relocate Azeri and Armenian populations into each other's provinces and sow the seeds of enmity. To this day, there are families who live half on the Iranian side of the border and half on the other side (kind of like the Koreas), but I digress. Anyway, as a condition of giving in to the Russian forces, Iran agreed to give up its land territory but NOT its sea. If you were to actually look at the map of all of Azerbaijan (both the two Iranian provinces and the independent one), you'll see that a chunk of Iranian Azerbaijan is into what used to be soviet union and the coastal lines are striped away. And if you were to look at the political map of Iran and Soviet union from the cold war era, then you see that Iranian territory into Caspian sea moves well beyond its coastal lines. This is the left over from the agreements with the Russians from the time that all those coastlines belonged to Iran. The agreement worked well before the break down of Soviet Union, but now it leaves the independent Azerbaijan without a chunk of its coastline. Incidentally, the article you posted on the Caspian oil project missed an important point: Russia has no interest in seeing another oil pipeline to Europe. So aside from the legal claim that Iran holds over those waters, Russians are supportive of the Iranian claim for self interest as well. ST