Syrian government condemns oil deal between Kurds and US firm as ‘theft’

The SDF, a Kurdish-led paramilitary alliance, backs a semi-autonomous administration in northeastern Syria and controls the country’s biggest oilfields, still claimed by Damascus.

The Syrian foreign ministry statement, published on state media, said the agreement was set “to steal Syrian oil… supported by the US administration.”

The statement decried “an agreement between… thieves who steal and thieves who buy”.

It also condemned “the hostile US position towards Syria, the theft of the Syrian people’s riches and its hindrance of the state’s reconstruction efforts”.

The statement came days after senator Lindsey Graham, a longtime supporter of the Syrian Kurds, told a congressional hearing on Thursday that he had spoken about the deal with SDF commander General Mazloum Abdi.

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“Apparently they’ve signed a deal with an American oil company to modernise the oil fields in northeastern Syria,” Graham said.

Asked by Graham if the US was supportive of the deal, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said: “We are.”

“The deal took a little longer, senator, than we had hoped and we’re now in implementation. It can be very powerful,” Pompeo said.

Senior US officials confirmed an agreement to “modernise” the fields, without naming the US company or providing other details.

Lucrative oil fields

Syria’s war began in 2011 with the violent suppression of peaceful protests and snowballed into a multi-fronted conflict pulling in multiple external powers.

The fighting has often destroyed hydrocarbon infrastructure, which has been coveted by the various belligerents.

During the long-running conflict, IS seized large swathes of the country, including some of the most lucrative oil-producing fields in the country’s northeast. The fields subsequently fell into the hands of the Kurds as the SDF, backed by a US-led coalition seized the final patch of IS territory in March 2019.

In October, US President Donald Trump said that a small contingent of US troops would remain in Syria to guard those fields as the US evacuated its forces amid a Turkish offensive against the Kurds.

“We’ve secured the oil, and, therefore, a small number of US troops will remain in the area where they have the oil,” Trump said.

Before the civil war, Syria produced nearly 400,000 barrels of oil per day, but output has collapsed during the conflict.

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Speaking to reporters on Monday, Esper said American soldiers will deploy around the oilfields to prevent Islamic State (IS) group fighters from recapturing them.

The US deployment will also allow the oil to remain under the control of the SDF, a Kurdish-led militia that served as a key ally to Washington in the fight against IS in the war-torn country.

“We want to make sure that SDF does have access to the resources in order to guard the [IS] prisons, in order to arm their own troops, in order to assist us with the ‘defeat ISIS’ mission,” Esper said, using another acronym for the militant group.

The secretary of defence’s comments come a day after US troops killed the leader and founder of IS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, during a raid in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province.

While announcing Baghdadi’s death early on Sunday, Donald Trump suggested that the US may keep the oil in eastern Syria for itself.

“Look, we don’t want to keep soldiers between Syria and Turkey for the next 200 years. They have been fighting for hundreds of years. We’re out,” the US president said.

“But we are leaving soldiers to secure the oil. Now, we may have to fight for the oil. That’s okay. Maybe somebody else wants the oil, in which case they have a hell of a fight.”

Trump has faced rebuke in Washington for pulling American troops from northern Syria, effectively allowing Turkey to start a military operation against the US-backed SDF.

Earlier this month, the US administration helped broker a ceasefire to suspend the offensive thanks to a deal that would see Kurdish fighters leave the areas along the Turkish border.

Esper said on Monday that the remaining US soldiers in Syria will work closely with SDF fighters.

“Turkey continues to bear responsibility for the consequences of their unwarranted incursion, which has brought further instability to the region,” the Pentagon chief said.

However, he echoed Trump by saying that the US should not be policing the conflict.

“Acting as a police force out to solve every dispute is not our mission,” Esper said. “Our mission in Syria today remains the same as when we began operations in 2014: to enable the enduring defeat of ISIS.”