A convoy of more than 100 US vehicles, including tankers loaded with “stolen Syrian oil”, made their way out of the country’s north-eastern area into Iraq through the “illegitimate” al-Waleed border crossing on Monday, the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) has reported.
SANA cited unnamed sources as saying that the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) militia’s SUV vehicles “equipped with various types of machine guns accompanied the convoy”.
Monday's development is the latest in a series of instances of the illegal smuggling of Syrian oil by the US and its Kurdish allies that have been reported by Syrian media over the past several months.
Last month, SANA claimed that a 70-vehicle convoy from the al-Jazeera region had been taken out of the country, again using the al-Waleed crossing. Before that, 25 more oil carriers were spotted driving through the border crossing into Iraq.
The Pentagon justifies the deployment of US forces in Syria by asserting that they are there to ensure the “enduring defeat” of Daesh* terrorists.
The former Daesh "caliphate" was formally routed by both Syrian and Iraqi forces by 2017, with Washington continuing to use the purported threat of the group’s re-emergence as justification for its continued presence in both countries.
Damascus, in turn, insists the US presence in Syria is illegal and accuses Washington of seeking to plunder Syrian oil. During his presidency, Donald Trump openly admitted that “the only forces” he had in Syria were there to “take the oil”.
The US presence in Syria is not supported by any UN Security Council mandate, and Washington does not have an invitation from Damascus to operate in the Arab Republic.
*Daesh (ISIL/ISIS/Islamic State) is a terrorist group banned in Russia and a number of other countries.