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Vehicles carrying Syria's national flag and playing pro-President Bashar al-Assad songs, drive through the streets in Damascus on Aug. 28, 2013.KHALED AL-HARIRI/Reuters

The connection between Syria and rattled stock markets isn't entirely clear, until you focus on crude oil and the fact that at least one observer can see a spike to $150 (U.S.) a barrel if the conflict spreads.

No, Syria isn't a top oil exporter, especially after the United States and the European Union imposed trading sanctions on the country. But it is situated in a sensitive area for oil exports from other countries – making a wider conflict potentially very disruptive.

As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, the Suez Canal and the Suez-Mediterranean pipeline are in nearby Egypt. Turkey is home to the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline and the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline. And fields in northern Iraq have been producing 3 million barrels of crude a day last year.

In other words, allow the conflict in Syria to draw in neighbouring regions and you have the recipe for an energy crisis that limping Western economies can ill afford.

Michael Wittner, an oil analyst at SocGen, believes that the price of Brent crude – the benchmark price of oil produced from the North Sea – will rise to $125 a barrel if, as reports suggest, the U.S. leads an attack on Syria. It could go as high as $150 a barrel if the conflict spreads, affecting oil production in Iraq, surpassing a peak seen in 2008.

"In our base case, we assume an attack begins in the next week," he said in a note, according to Reuters. "If it takes longer, and there are no signals that an attack is imminent, the oil price uplift from the entire Syrian situation will start to fade."

On Tuesday, global stocks were rattled by news of an impending attack, sending the S&P 500 to a seven-week low. West Texas Intermediate crude – the U.S. benchmark price – surged about $3 to an 18-month high. On Wednesday, WTI crude again rose, to $110.33 a barrel, up $1.32. Brent crude rose to $115.93 a barrel, up $1.57.

However, Canadian energy stocks aren't playing along. The S&P/TSX energy index rose just 0.6 per cent on Wednesday, after falling on Tuesday. The index continues to drift along a flat path over the past four years.

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