US Beefs Up Illegal Syria Presence With More Arms, Supplies as Biden Renews Executive Order

Damascus has repeatedly demanded that all foreign forces not explicitly invited into the country by the Middle Eastern nation’s internationally recognized government vacate Syria immediately.

US forces have reportedly sent another convoy loaded with weapons, munitions and logistical equipment to illegal bases in Syria’s Hasakah province.

Sources on the ground in the town of al-Qahtaniyah, northeast Syria told the Syrian Arab News Agency Friday that a convoy of 56 trucks and tankers, 8 Humvees, and an unspecified number of Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) militia vehicles made their way into the country via the illegal al-Waleed crossing point and proceeded en route to SDF bases in the region.

The deployment comes just one day after US President Joe Biden’s announcement that the White House would renew executive order 13894 of 14 October 2019 on the situation in Syria for another year. The order, first issued by Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump, enables the US to illegally sanction any person or entity it deems to “threaten the peace, security, stability, or territorial integrity of Syria” or commit “serious human rights abuses,” and calls for the creation of a “new Syrian government that is representative [of] and respects the will of the Syrian people.”

The executive order is one of several tools in Washington’s toolbox of crushing sanctions against Syria, which have helped to prevent the government of Bashar al-Assad to rebuild the country from a devastating foreign-backed conflict following Damascus’s string of military victories against an assortment of Western-backed rebel groups and jihadist militants.

Syrian authorities and media regularly report on the back-and-forth shuttling of US troops into and out of the Middle Eastern country, and the plunder of tens of millions of dollars’ worth of oil and food resources from the war-torn nation’s energy- and food-rich northeastern regions every month.

Syria’s energy ministry estimates that Washington and its Kurdish allies control as much as 90 percent of the country’s oil-producing regions. Unlike many of its neighbours, Syria is not a major oil exporter. Nevertheless, before war broke out in 2011, the country produced enough oil and gas to ensure its energy self-sufficiency, and exported some resources in exchange for hard currency. The country was also one of the few nations in the Middle East to secure food self-sufficiency. That too evaporated with the war and US-Kurdish militia's occupation of the country’s northeastern breadbasket. The country’s food and energy deficits have been ameliorated by Russian and Iranian emergency aid, with Moscow delivering hundreds of thousands of tonnes of wheat supplies and Tehran providing fuel via tanker ships which first have to make the treacherous journey from the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean to the Eastern Mediterranean.

US troops entered eastern Syria in 2017 under the pretext of fighting Daesh (ISIS).* The terrorist group’s ‘caliphate’ was effectively liquidated by the end of that year, but US forces stayed on, ostensibly to prevent the terrorists from reconstituting.

Washington is currently believed to have about 900 troops, including a Green Beret special forces unit, stationed in the country alongside their Kurdish allies. Their presence assures that Damascus cannot launch an offensive to regain control over its lost territories without the risk of sparking a massive US retaliation.