How America’s Iraq oil saga might be replayed in Syria – Firstpost

The United States (US) might mess up Syria—like Iraq.

Three days after Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a coalition of Jihadists from the erstwhile al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate) and Syrian rebels captured Damascus on December 7, US secretary of state 
Antony Blinken said that the US “reaffirms its full support for a Syrian-led and Syrian-owned political transition”. The Syrians “will decide the future of Syria”, he added.

However, the US, infamous for reneging on promises, is increasing its military presence in the war-ravaged nation despite a transitional government headed by HTS chief and Syria’s de facto leader Ahmed al-Sharaa.

Increased US military presence in Syria

The latest development comes after the Pentagon lied about the exact number of US troops stationed in Syria in the last several years.

Around four years after the US involvement in the Syrian Civil War, then-President Donald Trump unilaterally ordered the withdrawal of around 2,000–2,500 troops from the nation in December 2018. However, he agreed to keep a contingency force of 400-500 soldiers in Syria indefinitely on the pretext of countering the Islamic State (IS) after apparently withdrawing the rest in October 2019.

That was the first lie. Later, it was revealed that around 900 American troops were present in Syria as of February 2021. The second lie was revealed last December when the Pentagon said it had around 2,000 troops in Syria. Shockingly, Pentagon spokesperson Major General Pat Ryder told the media that he “learned the number today”, but the 2,000 troops had been there for months before President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster.

The US already has five known military bases in northeast Syria.

Mission Support Site Euphrates, also known as the Conoco gas field site, is in territory controlled primarily by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-led coalition of American-backed ethnic militias and rebel groups that fought the IS.

Mission Support Site Green Village, known as Omar, is about 47 km south of Conoco. Patrol Base Shaddadi and Rumalyn Landing Zone are located closer to the border with Iraq. The al-Tanf Garrison is situated southeast near the borders with Iraq and Jordan.

In the latest move to expand its military presence in Syria, 
50 US Army trucks loaded with concrete fortifications and accompanied by an SDF military vehicle were headed to the Kurdish-majority city of Kobani (Kobane), or Ain al-Arab, in Aleppo on January 2, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

Mustafa Al-Ali, a Kurdish journalist from Syria, tweeted a video showing one of the trucks with a US flag.

Breaking :US forces start building a military base in the city center of Kobani. pic.twitter.com/YgqXFn65dx

— Mustafa Al-Ali (@Mustafa_Alali2) January 2, 2025

On Wednesday, another US convoy supplied premade chambers, surveillance cameras, cement blocks, fuel tanks and digging equipment to Kobani. “More military reinforcements such as soldiers, weapons, armoured vehicles, radars and anti-aircraft weapons, will be brought,” the SOHR said.

More American troops will complicate US relations with its NATO ally Turkey and the bloody situation with Syria divided between rebel factions battling for dominance.

HTS and other allied opposition groups control the biggest chunk—in the western, central and southern parts, such as Damascus, Aleppo, Manbij, Idlib, Hama, Homs and Derra.

The SDF controls the northeast, including Deir ez-Zor, Raqqa and Qamishi.

The Turkey-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) rebel force, comprising former al-Qaeda, IS and Free Syrian Army members, controls northern Syria, including Afrin, Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ain.

All these years, the US has shown its double standards regarding the SDF, whose main militia force is the YPG, the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). On the one hand, the US, along with Turkey, has designated the PKK as a terrorist organisation, on the other hand, Washington has been arming its Syrian branch to fight the IS.

Since the lightning HTS takeover of Damascus, the coalition and the SNA have waged bloody battles with the SDF to capture more territories.

The SNA, backed by Turkish war jets and artillery, captured the key city of Manbij and the surrounding areas on December 8. Now, the SNA and SDF are locked in a pitched battle for supremacy in the north causing around 240 deaths since December 8. On January 3, more than 60 people were killed when the SDF and SNA clashed near Manbij and the Tishreen Dam, east of Aleppo.

The situation in Kobani has become extremely volatile with the SNA amassing troops to capture it. While Turkey plans “the elimination” of the SDF, per its foreign minister Hakan Fidan, the US is in an indirect confrontation with Turkey and the HTS.

Reason for new US base in Kobani

In November 2019, Trump mentioned the motive for retaining 400-500 troops in Syria. “We’re keeping the oil, remember that. We want to keep the oil—$45 million a month.”

In an 
interview with 
Fox News in January 2020, Trump said, “I left troops to take the oil. I took the oil. The only troops I have are taking the oil. They’re protecting the oil. I took over the oil.”

The reason for building a new US military base in Kobani is oil.

Supporting the SDF against the HTS and the SNA or countering the IS, which has a negligible presence, is a US pretext for controlling the oil fields.

Syria’s proven oil reserves are around 7 billion barrels, accounting for a mere 0.5 per cent of the global production in 2010, the year before the civil war.

According to the Energy Institute’s latest data, Syria accounted for less than 0.05 per cent of global oil production in 2023. Syria’s oil production declined from around 385,000 barrels per day before the war to only about 20,000 barrels per day in 2024.

However, Syria is the only significant crude oil-producing country in the Eastern Mediterranean and strategically important due to its transit routes. It has oil and gas reserves in the northeast, which has 95 per cent of the reserves, and southwest.

The SDF-controlled Deir ez-Zor region has around 12 fields containing 1.1 billion barrels of oil, holding around 40 per cent of the country’s oil reserves and several gas fields.

Kobani, in the Ayn al-Arab District, lies south of the border with Turkey. The city was captured by the YPG during the civil war in 2012 and became the administrative centre of the Kobani Canton, which later became the de facto Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, or Rajova, comprising Raqqa, Tabqa, Deir ez-Zor, Jazira and Euphrates.

The IS captured Kobani in September 2014 and controlled it till January 2015, when the SDF and US forces recaptured it in what is known as the ‘Kurdish Stalingrad’.

Kobani doesn’t have major oil and gas reserves but is an important oil transit route and also links Syria’s north with the Iraqi Kurdish region. A corridor of oil pipelines and refineries lies from Kobani’s west, past Sinjar and towards Irbil in the east—a vital oil transit route for the US and the Kurds.

The IS, like the US, wanted to capture Kobani for the same reason. The terrorist organisation earned a daily revenue of $2 million by producing 300-500 barrels of refined petroleum.

The US was alarmed when Assad allowed Russia to restore oil production to pre-civil war levels. Under an energy cooperation agreement signed in January 2018, Damascus gave Moscow exclusive rights to produce oil and gas and rebuild the sector by rehabilitating damaged rigs and constructing new ones.

In December 2019, two little-known Russian companies, Mercury and Velada, tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s henchman and Wagner PMC boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, signed an oil exploration deal with Syria.

Trump immediately decided not to withdraw from Syria completely. The Pentagon lied to the public and justified the presence of US troops, which were more than 400-500, to protect its oil interests in Syria.

Assad was aware of the American designs on Syria’s oil. “It’s about money and it’s about oil … Of course, we are angry; every Syrian is angry. This is looting,” he said.

On April 8, 2020, the Trump administration secretly allowed a little-known Delaware firm, Delta Crescent Energy, to develop and modernise more than 50 per cent of the oil fields in northeast Syria and explore oil in Rumeilan, Tel Hamees, and Tel Brak by exempting it from Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, 2019, imposed on Assad.

The secret deal was revealed during a Senate hearing exchange between Blinken’s predecessor, Mike Pompeo, and South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham.

Unsurprisingly, one of Delta Crescent’s three co-founders is John Dorrier. He was among the first American oil executives to vie for contracts with Baghdad after the 2003 Iraq invasion. In fact, his firm, Gulfsands Petroleum, signed the first American oil drilling contract in Syria in 15 years in May 2003.

The other co-founders are James Cain, George W Bush’s US ambassador to Denmark, and James Reese, a retired Delta Force officer who established a private security firm.

After the deal with Delta Crescent, which was incorporated in 2019, the US had a bigger justification for maintaining deployment in Syria—assisting the SDF in repelling Syrian and Iranian forces and the IS was a small aspect of the bigger game for oil.

Moreover, helping the SDF also ensured the protection of the oil fields. A special SDF team of 200 members, Critical Petroleum Infrastructure, was formed to protect the oil facilities.

Delta Crescent’s run abruptly stopped in May 2021 when President Joe Biden didn’t renew its one-year sanctions waiver. However, Biden didn’t disclose the number of troops based in Syria either and the reason for their deployment, which was oil.

Assad’s then-oil minister Bassam Toma’a had then claimed that 
90 per cent of Syrian oil, was under US control. “The Americans and their followers are acting like pirates as they are targeting the Syrian oil wealth and oil supplies,” he had said.

With its transitional government in power, HTS and its backer Turkey are also vying for the oil-rich northeast. Turkish energy minister Alparslan Bayraktar recently told the media that Ankara wants to revive Syria’s oil and gas sector. “We are also studying the use of crude oil and natural gas for the reconstruction of Syria,” he said adding that there were plans to lay oil and gas pipelines between the two countries.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has become a power broker in Syria. He wants the SDF out of the northeast so that Turkey can have a big share of Syrian oil. Therefore, HTS and SNA are targeting the SDF.

Syria’s situation could become messier with the US and Turkey vying for oil. Recently, Syrian oil minister Ghiath Diab, without naming the deployed American forces, said that several oil wells “outside the administration of the Syrian state” are “one of the biggest and most prominent obstacles” in the country’s recovery.

The US never wanted to withdraw from Syria and most likely continue its oil mission there with Trump returning to the White House.

In November 2020, Trump’s then-special envoy in the counter-IS fight Jim Jeffrey revealed that the 
US never intended to withdraw from Syria.

“What Syria withdrawal? There was never a Syria withdrawal. When the situation in northeast Syria had been fairly stable after we defeated ISIS (IS) [Trump] was inclined to pull out. In each case, we then decided to come up with five better arguments for why we needed to stay—and we succeeded both times. That’s the story,” he said.

With the Syrian Civil War over and Assad gone, a mad rush for oil would follow—like in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was toppled.

In 2013, 10 years after Operation Iraqi Freedom, oil giants like ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and Shell were doing business in the war-torn nation.

Oil was not the only goal of the Iraq War, but it was certainly the central one, as top U.S. military and political figures have attested to in the years following the invasion.

As then-senator 
Chuck Hagel, appointed defence secretary in 2013, said in 2007, “People say we’re not fighting for oil—of course, we are.”

The writer is a freelance journalist with more than two decades of experience and comments primarily on foreign affairs. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.