US Building New Base in Oil Rich Area in Syria's Deir ez-Zor Province - Reports

According to the resource, a new US Coalition base is being built in the area east of the city of Mejadin, near al-Omar, Syria's largest oil field.

Col (ret.) Alexander Zhilin, head of the Moscow-based Center for the Study of Applied Problems of National Security, said that there was an obvious trend for the Pentagon to create new facilities in and around Syria's largest oil and gas fields. Speaking to the Federal News Agency, the retired officer said this trend makes it clear that the US has no plans to leave Syria any time soon, and that their intervention has nothing to do with establishing order or fighting against terrorism.

"Over the space of several years, the US has deployed 25 military facilities in Syria, and are continuing to build new ones. In general, they try to act in such a way as to establish control of oil-rich areas and energy resources. At the same time, they don't believe they should be accountable to anyone," the analyst noted.

According to Zhilin, the US's role in Syria today is to subvert and destabilize the situation, via, for example, the creation of a new terrorist army to fight the Syrian military, or to stage a provocation in Eastern Ghouta using chlorine to allow US air power to strike against the Syrian army directly.

The US and its coalition allies began a campaign of airstrikes against Daesh* in 2014, following it up by the deployment of US forces into Syrian-Kurdish areas as the terrorists' so-called caliphate began to shrink. Damascus has criticized the US intervention, repeatedly pointing out that it was never invited into the country by the internationally recognized government of President Bashar Assad.

*A terrorist group banned in Russia.