According to as report in the Financial Times on December 12, 2014, China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi, during a meeting with Iraq's Foreign Minister Ibrahim Jafari on the sidelines of the UN meeting on anti-terrorism in September, offered to help Iraq defeat the ISIS Sunni extremists. Jafari told the Financial Times in Tehran, “I welcomed this initiative. I told him . . . we are ready to deal with the coalition and also co-operate with countries outside this coalition.” China’s Defence Ministry declined to comment on Jafari’s remarks. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, would not comment on whether China was supplying air support or missiles, but said “China has been fighting terrorism and has been providing support and assistance to Iraq, including the Kurdish region, in our own way, and we will continue to do so within the best of our capabilities.”
(Comment: China is the largest foreign investor in Iraq’s oil sector and stands to lose the billions its State-owned Enterprises (SoEs) have ploughed into the country if the fields are lost to the insurgents. Sinopec operates in Kurdistan, while China National Petroleum Corp has interests in the Rumaila field near Basra and in Maysan province near the Iranian border. CNPC has already abandoned oilfields it operated in Syria. Global Times reported earlier this week that ISIS was dismantling equipment at a small refinery west of Baiji in which a Chinese company has invested for use at refineries that it controls in Mosul, Iraq’s second-biggest city.)
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