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 26 October 19 It's Live on the HomePage Now: Reader Supported News Sure, I'll make a donation!
FOCUS: Juan Cole | New War for Oil? Trump to Occupy Oil-Rich Syrian Province With Tank Corps, Asks for Kurdish Displacement There
 Juan Cole, Informed Comment Cole writes: "Trump said he talked to Syrian Democratic Forces leader Gen. Mazloum Abdi on Thursday. As usual, Trump's report of the conversation is marred by outright lies and bizarre allegations." EXCERPT:
What Trump was likely referring to was Abdi’s relief at the pause in fighting arranged by vice president Mike Pence last week, which gave Russia time to impose severe limits on Turkey’s advance into Syria.
Trump had earlier said, “This was an outcome created by us, the United States, and nobody else, Now we’re getting out. … Let someone else fight over this long-bloodstained sand.”
Trump goes back and forth between dismissing Syria as an unimportant desert and playing up its small oil reserves. Northeast Syria, from which Trump pulled 1,000 US special operations personnel, is the most fertile agricultural area in Syria and is for the most part not desert.
As for the issue of oil, Syria’s reserves are mostly in the east, with the bulk in the southeast province of Deir al-Zor (Deir Ezzor). Its population is largely Sunni Arab and it had been controlled by ISIL, but Abdi’s Kurdish troops and some Arab allies fought down there. The al-Assad regime wants this region back, and even risked tangling with the US over a Conoco Gas plant in 2018.
The Guardian’s Julian Borger points out that Trump administration officials are talking about the possibility of a US tank force invading Deir al-Zor from Iraq and occupying it. The goal would be to deny the oil resources to a resurgent ISIL but also to keep them out of the hands of the Syrian government. Also, the US is somehow convinced, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that it can block Iranian personnel and supply lines into Syria with this southeast garrison.
Trump appears to have encouraged a massive Kurdish population movement down to Deir al-Zor from the northeast in order to deny ISIL and Damascus the petroleum. This suggestion would please Turkey, which dreams of kicking hundreds of thousands of Syrian Kurds out of their homes and replacing them with Sunni Arab Syrian refugees now resident in Turkey. As Samantha Power observed, Trump is signing on to Erdogan’s
ethnic cleansing effort, for his own purposes. |
