PARIS: Oil prices are firmly up on fears of fresh escalation in Syria’s brutal war, coupled with compliance with a pledge by the OPEC group and Russia to limit production, the International Energy Agency said Friday. However, a string of tit-for-tat tariff announcements by the world’s top economies the US and China has sparked worries that prices could suffer should their dispute descend into an all-out trade war. “Political uncertainty in the Middle East has returned to the fore in recent days. As we write, uncertainty about the next steps in Syria and Yemen have helped propel the price of Brent crude oil back above $70” per barrel, the IEA said in its monthly report. The price of oil was also supported by a drop in production by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Russia, as they continued to comply with a 2016 deal that was reached in Vienna after prices crashed amid a global glut. In fact, some of the parties to the agreement cut their production even more than they had promised, the IEA said. “It is not for us to declare on behalf of the Vienna agreement countries that it is ‘mission accomplished’, but if our outlook is accurate, it certainly looks very much like it,” it added. OPEC de factor leader Saudi Arabia pushed its production below its target, meanwhile, as unrest in Libya also kept output below planned levels. Another country suffering production drops was crisis-hit Venezuela, which has been forced to increasingly rely on crude imports, chiefly from Russia, to meet its needs. Output by non-OPEC member the US, meanwhile, continued to accelerate, the IEA said. The agency said that thanks to the OPEC cuts and high global oil demand the rise in American production was not significant enough to force prices down. However, should the tariff announcements by Washington and Beijing give way to a trade war, global oil demand and the broader economy may suffer. “The economic outlook remains supportive, but the trade dispute between the US and China is introducing a downward risk to the forecast,” the IEA said, citing secondary sources.