ISSUE #68: The United States of Looting steals more Syrian oil.
Pure unadulterated 19th century colonialism.
The United States of Looting has done it again. Stealing resources from other countries deeply belongs to the American values that the US constantly boasts about.
The news broke out a couple of weeks ago which showed the US occupation forces in Syria taking 70 oil tankers out of Syria into Iraq through illegal al-Waleed crossing.
So that you can visualize, here’s the illegal crossing that the American troops use regularly to smuggle Syria’s resources out of the country into Iraq:
If you look at the places where the American troops are deployed, you’d find that most of Syria’s oil fields are found in those places, i.e. the governates of Hassakeh and Deir-El Zour. That’s not a coincidence. The US occupation forces are in Syria specifically to steal the oil - the commodity that America has a long history of overthrowing foreign governments for.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s Mike Pompeo, the former US Secretary of State, and Senator Lindsay Graham talking about “modernizing” the Syrian oil fields in Aug 2020:
Do you see how creative they are in regards of hiding their act of plundering the foreign country’s resources? As if Syria is begging the imperialist US to come and update the infrastructure. “Modernizing Syrian oil fields” is a nice and democratic way of saying: plundering, stealing, looting. That’s how the colonizers and imperialists speak. They use these kinds of terms to make the public think that the US occupation forces in Syria are only for the goodness of the country and its people, which is as ridiculous as it sounds.
Here are the US occupation forces “modernizing” the oil fields:
In another example, Trump admitted that the US troops are in Syria “only for the oil.”
“We left troops behind ONLY FOR THE OIL.” That’s how shameless he is. Any American politician can openly admit that they are looting the Syrian oil, and still suffer no consequences. That’s what American exceptionalism is all about.
It’s not the first time that they are stealing the Syrian oil. In 2021, around 100 oil tankers were rolled out of Syria through the same illegal crossing into Iraq. Not only this, the US occupation forces earlier this year set up a fucking refinery to process the stolen Syrian oil in the town of Rmelan in Hassakeh governate. Can you even imagine a foreign country coming to the US, smuggling its oil, and on top of that, setting up a refinery to steal more? No? Then why do we think that it’s OK for the US to go anywhere in the world and do anything it wants?
On a global scale, Syria is not a large oil-producing nation. It’s nowhere near to Saudi Arabia or Russia or the US, but when you take into account the revenue that oil brings to Syria, it matters a lot. According to the IMF, in 2010, oil sales were projected to account for 25% of the government revenue. That means oil was a major source of income for Syria before the war started in 2011. The US occupation forces are stealing the same oil that Syria, in terms of revenue, was so dependent upon, which directly impoverishes or hurts the Syrians.
When you take a look at this situation critically, you see the Western/European occupation forces coming to a distant land that do not belong to them, colonizing it, and plundering its resources. How is this any different from the colonialism of the 19th century? How is it any different from the French colonizing Africa or Britishers looting India? So if you think that colonialism doesn’t exist today, you are painfully wrong.
Colonialism exists to this day and it’s being led by the West.