OPINION — President Trump’s sending U.S. military troops to control the oil fields in northern Syria can only be interpreted as introducing financial deal-making into his running of U.S. foreign and national security policies.
Trump made clear in his Sunday press conference that he sees control of the Syrian oil fields as America’s reward, perhaps to be shared with Kurdish allies, for defeating ISIS and killing of its founder and leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
However, it is anyone’s guess exactly what Trump has in mind.
On Sunday, Trump said, “We are leaving soldiers to secure the oil. We may have to fight for the oil, it’s ok. It stops ISIS because ISIS got tremendous wealth from that oil. We have taken it…someone else may claim it. We will either negotiate a deal with whoever is claiming it or we will militarily stop them very quickly. We have tremendous power in that part of the world.”
After saying, “We should be able to take some [oil] also,” Trump then tossed out another possibility. “What I intend to do, perhaps, is make a deal with an ExxonMobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly.”
He continued to “spitball” ideas. “It is big oil underground, but not big oil up top. Much of the machinery has been shot and dead. It has been through wars…We are protecting the oil. We are securing the oil. That doesn’t mean we don’t make a deal at some point.”
The New York Times Columnist Thomas L. Friedman, who has covered Middle East affairs for decades, wrote that Trump on Sunday “kept going on and on about he, in his infinite wisdom, was keeping troops to protect the oil fields there so maybe U.S. oil companies could exploit them. This is digesting talk, and again, a prescription for trouble."
It is unclear under what legal authority U.S. troops are occupying this chunk of Syrian land and controlling Syrian oil fields, or how Trump could justify taking military action against Syrian or other forces claiming ownership of the oil.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), in his press conference Sunday from the White House, explained to reporters, “What you don’t understand is these oil fields are in areas the SDF [the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces] operates. This was a chief source of revenue for a long time for ISIS and is now in the hands of…mostly Kurds in partnership with the United States.”
He added, “No, this doesn’t violate any law in my view. What it does is just good, common sense, foreign policy.”
Using the need to protect the fields from ISIS, having claimed it has been defeated, is a phony excuse, although Defense Secretary Mark Esper used it Monday during a Pentagon press conference. Esper also had to dance around a question as to whether more U.S. troops are needed to protect the oil fields than those Trump claimed were coming home.
How long Esper will continue to humiliate himself to support Trump’s verbal twists and turns may be a question for his next press conference.
On Sunday, Trump and Graham made no mention of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad or his government having any rights to the oil. Nor did they acknowledge any agreement the SDF may have made with Assad since the Turkish invasion of the SDF’s border territory.
In January 2018, Syria and Russia signed a bilateral agreement that gave Moscow exclusive rights to extract oil and gas from fields in Syria under Assad’s control. Another subsequent agreement between the two countries called for Syrian “restoration of oil fields and the development of new deposits.” A later one called for joint Moscow–Damascus cooperation to enhance the quality of Syrian oil production facilities.
Given these agreements, Assad—and his Russian and Iranian backers—will likely push to assert more control in the region of the northeastern oil fields, essentially returning them to the status quo before the civil war began.
Last Wednesday, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said the Damascus government should re-impose control of all oil facilities in the northeastern part of the country. He said that “everything” should return to the control of the legitimate government in Damascus, stressing that this doesn’t mean the end of the political process in the war-torn country.”
Bogdanov added, “All the official statements say that all parties involved must honor and respect the territorial integrity, sovereignty and unity of the Syrian state.”
On Saturday, Russia’s defense ministry toughened the rhetoric calling the U.S. military presence in eastern Syria “international state banditry” motivated by a desire to protect oil smugglers, meaning the SDF, and not guard against the ISIS terrorists. The Russian ministry statement added that U.S. troops and private security companies in eastern Syria are protecting oil smugglers who make more than $30 million a month.
A bit of history is relevant.
U.S. forces went into Syria under the Obama administration to defeat the ISIS caliphate and destroy the terrorist group’s leadership, but not at the request of the Syrian government. ISIS had killed Americans, influenced bombings in the U.S., Iraq and other countries and thus was a threat to the U.S. and its allies.
When ISIS controlled that northern part of Syria, the terrorist group helped fund its operations by selling an estimated $30 million a month of oil to Assad’s Syrian government or by smuggling oil to buyers in Turkey.
As part of the U.S. effort to cut off ISIS funding, American aircraft, starting in 2015, began bombing some of those Syrian oil facilities in the Deir el-Zour province, knocking out oil tanker convoys, oil processing plants, storage facilities, pumping stations, pipelines and refineries.
In 2016, American Special Forces assisted by Kurdish fighters of the (SDF) seized some of the northern Syria oil fields and the rest in 2017. Thereafter oil sales from those fields were used to support the SDF.
Defense Secretary Esper made clear Monday that he believed any oil income derived from the Syrian fields would help pay the SDF for maintaining the facilities now holding captured ISIS terrorists, thereby saving money the U.S. might otherwise be paying. Meanwhile, Esper said he had asked NATO last week to also help defer the other costs in fighting the remaining ISIS terrorists in Syria.
In a 5:32 a.m. tweet last Friday, Trump wrote that “THE OIL” was the first thing that “we are getting out of the deal” he had made with Turkish President Erdogan. His tweet then followed the oil reference with “AND WE ARE BRINGING OUR SOLDIERS BACK HOME, ISIS SECURED!”
The Syrian oil fields have been only the latest ones Trump has suggested the U.S. should seize.
As a presidential candidate in a July 8, 2015, interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Trump said that he would “bomb the hell out of Iraq oil fields,” then under the control of ISIS. Then, Trump said that after defeating ISIS, “I’d then get Exxon, I’d get these great oil companies to go in. They would rebuild them so fast your head would spin.” He said he would put a ring of U.S. troops around the Iraqi oil fields and “take all the wealth away. This is what should be done, but no politician is going to do that.”
His views have hardly changed when it comes to oil. He believes U.S. national security activities should be run as an element of his America First view of the world.
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