Pentagon claims US troops ‘not guarding’ oil fields in Syria
A Pentagon spokesman has claimed that the American troops deployed to Syria are not protecting oil reserves in the Arab country, while admitting that an American firm is exploiting Syrian oil without authorization from Damascus.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told a news briefing on Monday that since an American firm had signed a deal with Kurdish militants in northern Syria last year to help exploit the country’s oil reserves, US troops were not involved.
Damascus has said the agreement — signed between the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) militant group and an American oil company named by media sources as Delta Crescent Energy LLC — is null and void, and that the parties involved are plundering Syria’s national resources.
Kirby said the US military personnel and contractors “are not authorized to provide assistance to any other private company, including its employees or agents seeking to develop oil resources in northeast Syria.”
However, in an apparent justification for the continuing presence of American forces near Syrian oil fields, Kirby said the only exception was when US troops in Syria were operating under existing authorizations to guard civilians.
Kirby said about 900 US service members were deployed to Syria to fight the remnants of the Daesh terrorist group. “It’s important to remember that our mission there remains to enable the enduring defeat of ISIS,” he said, using an alternative acronym for Daesh.
Several times during his presidency, Trump contradicted the account often offered by his advisers and US military officials that the US was fighting Daesh in Syria, saying explicitly that the American troops in the Arab country were there “only for the oil.”
In 2019, Trump decided to keep hundreds of US troops in Syria to “secure” the country’s oilfields despite a campaign promise to end US wars abroad.
