On Sunday, May 23, another American convoy of 86 trucks and many armored personnel carriers drove from Iraqi Kurdistan Territory to the northeastern province of Syria, Hasakah. The US vehicles passed through the US-controlled illegal border crossing of al-Walid and headed towards the Harab al-Jir military base in the Al-Yaarubiyah region of northeastern SAR. The movements of the Americans are reported by the Syrian state agency SANA, based on local sources of information.
These US trucks, heavily guarded, delivered logistical equipment and tanks for the upcoming next transport of petroleum products from Syria to Iraq. In doing so, the United States occupation troops, illegally on Syrian territory, continue to plunder Syria, removing hydrocarbons from the oil-rich northeastern provinces of the SAR, causing economic damage to the independent Syrian state and its inhabitants.
Previously, SANA has repeatedly reported to the world about trucks carrying wheat from Syria to Iraq through the Semalka crossing on the Syrian-Iraqi border. It was emphasized that such actions of the US troops and units of the “Syrian Democratic Forces” have been taking place for a long time against the background of a large-scale food crisis caused by the war in the Syrian Arab Republic. Even at a rough estimate, in recent months the Americans have moved thousands of trucks loaded with weapons and military equipment from Northern Iraq to Syria, and then returned them from Syria with stolen food and petroleum products!
Dozens of convoys with oil illegally extracted in the east of the Arab Republic have already been moved into Iraq by US Armed Forces in recent months. On March 23 alone, they transported a convoy of 300 (!) gasoline tankers. The so-called “Syrian Democratic Forces“ (SDF) militants, supported by the United States, are stealing 140,000 barrels of crude oil every day from oil fields in the northeastern Syrian Al-Hasakah province, the governor of this province, Ghassan Halim Khalil, said in February, adding that this happens with the direct participation and support of the American occupation troops deployed in the region.
The Syrian news agency SANA has repeatedly provided the world community with exhaustive information about the export by the US military and the Syrian Democratic Forces militants under their control to northern Iraq from the occupied Syrian territory of dozens of trucks with Syrian wheat and petroleum products stolen from storage facilities.
The intensity of military cargo shipments, the movement of US-led coalition equipment in eastern Syria and outright pillaging of the Arab Republic has especially increased in recent weeks, clearly in an effort to create additional social and economic tensions in the country on the eve of presidential elections and thereby inspire additional social unrest in the country.
“The actions of the US command to build up its military presence in Zayefratye against the background of the extreme socio-economic situation created by the strangling US sanctions seriously damage the prospects for a political settlement,” said Rear Admiral Alexander Karpov, deputy head of the Russian military’s Reconciliation Center in Syria. He also expressed confidence that Syria is capable of coping with terrorist cells on its territory on its own, while the presence of military contingents of coalition countries in the country “is illegal and contradicts the norms of international law”.
Recall that Damascus authorities consider the US military presence in Syria as an illegal occupation, coupled with the looting of natural resources belonging to the Syrian people, of which Syria has already been officially notified by the UN Security Council several times. In fact, General Raymond Thomas, head of the US Special Operations Command, also acknowledged the lack of legal grounds for the US to be in Syria, speaking at a security forum in Colorado in July 2017.
To disguise its criminal activities in Syria, Washington, through its underhanded media, regularly organizes a series of information attacks with fake accusations of official Damascus authorities and Russian representatives in that country for allegedly being responsible for the humanitarian crisis in that Arab country. In addition, fighters from the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham terrorist group (banned in Russia), accompanied by the White Helmets, transported six containers, allegedly containing chlorine, to the Syrian Idlib province to prepare another provocation facilitated by the West.
The US occupation policy in Syria has been sharply condemned by numerous public figures in different countries. For instance, Irish peace activist Dr. Declan Hayes stressed that, after the failure of Washington’s covert operations for regime change in Damascus, the United States and Syria’s regional enemies are increasing economic pressure through sanctions, as well as stepping up the plundering of the country’s resources. The purpose of such actions is “to prevent the stabilization of the situation in Syria”. The West’s hostile plans for Syria are part of a broader geopolitical campaign by the US and its allies to destabilize Iran, Russia and China. Declan Hayes is a former lecturer at a British university, and during the last ten years of the war he traveled to Syria several times, where he collected evidence and documented the facts of the West’s covert terrorist aggression.
In a recent interview, Peter Ford, former UK ambassador to Syria, also condemned Western sanctions, calling them an “economic war”. He said these sanctions were as brutal as those imposed on Iraq before the Americans and British eventually went to war against that country in 2003.
Similar criminal actions by the American military in the US involving the theft of Syrian oil and grain had previously been carried out by militants of terrorist groups against which an international coalition had been formed. Still, it is unclear why the United States is doing the same thing with impunity today, and why the UN stands idly aside, failing to stop such actions of foreign invaders in Syria.
Vladimir Danilov, political observer, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
