What if militants attack the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline?
A BTC pipeline attack cuts ~600-650kbd of Azeri light to Ceyhan and the Med, firming Med-grade Brent and light-sweet differentials; long Brent vs WTI is the trade, with VIX bid on militant-escalation tail risk. Rhymes with the Aug-2008 BTC PKK bombing (and 2014 sabotage), which took the line down for weeks and added a clear Brent premium. Transmission: Azerbaijan exports via Turkey to European/Med refiners; forward angle: with Russian Med barrels already constrained in 2026, a BTC loss bites Italian/Mediterranean light-sweet supply harder than in 2008.
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The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Militant strikes on the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan line cut Caspian crude flows to the Mediterranean. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.