PENTAGON: US FORCES FOCUS ON IS, NOT ON PROTECTING SYRIAN OIL FIELDS

Wed 10 February 2021:

US forces in Syria are no longer responsible for protecting oil fields in the country as “their only duty is to fight the Islamic State (Daesh) remnants”, a Pentagon official said on Monday.

The 900 US military personnel and contractors in northeastern Syria “are not authorized to provide assistance to any other private company, including its employees or agents, seeking to develop oil resources in Syria,” Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, told reporters on Monday.

“It’s important to remember that our mission there remains to enable the enduring defeat of ISIS,” Kirby said in reference to Daesh.

The vast majority of oil fields in eastern and northeastern Syria are controlled by the US-backed, Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF); an alliance composed primarily of Kurdish militias.

In 2020, it surfaced that the administration of former US President Donald Trump has helped Delta Crescent Energy, a US oil company, secure an exclusive contract to market oil from fields in northeast Syria and granted it a special exemption from sanctions imposed by Washington on Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime.

In 2019, Trump reversed his decision to withdraw all US forces from northeastern Syria, saying he would keep a few hundred soldiers to “protect the oil”.