Iran Parliament speaker says US only seeks to plunder Syria’s oil

The United States is in pursuit of only one disgraceful objective through its military presence in Syria and that is plundering its oil, says Iran’s Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani.

“[US President Donald] Trump’s remarks clearly proved that they [Americans] only seek to steal [Syria’s] oil and this is a disgrace for a country that claims to be a superpower, because the country, which has a claim to the management of the entire world, has been degraded to a robber,” Larijani said in a meeting with a delegation of representatives from Syrian tribes in Tehran on Sunday.

In late October, Washington reversed an earlier decision to pull out all of its troops from northeastern Syria, announcing the deployment of about 500 soldiers to the oil fields controlled by Kurdish forces in the Arab country.

The US claimed that the move was aimed at protecting the fields and facilities from possible attacks by the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group. That claim came even as Trump had earlier suggested that Washington sought economic interests in controlling the oilfields.

Last month, Syria told the United Nations that the US had been occupying its oil fields and looting its resources as the world body remained silent on the act of misappropriation.

“The US occupies Syrian oil wells and plunders the Syrians’ revenues in the shadow of the UN Security Council’s silence,” Syria’s UN Ambassador Bashar al-Ja’afari told a meeting of the 15-member body in New York on November 13.

Syria’s state-run Al-Ikhbariya TV reported on December 16 that a large US military convoy had entered oil fields in northeastern Syria, despite widespread denunciation of the deployment as being tantamount to robbery.

The reinforcements, the television said, had been dispatched to the provinces of Hasakah and Dayr al-Zawr from neighboring Iraq.

Elsewhere in his remarks, the top Iranian parliamentarian slammed certain countries for setting conditions for the reconstruction of Syria, saying, “The Islamic Republic of Iran opposes any move against Syria’s territorial integrity and any act of aggression against this country, and supports Syria in its fight against terrorism and in its reconstruction drive.”

Larijani added that Syria has played a very influential role to strengthen the resistance movement in recent decades, particularly under the circumstances that some countries do not favor tranquility in Syria and have inflicted severe damage on the infrastructure of the country.

He emphasized that under normal circumstances and free from crisis, no country would dare to carry out any act of adventurism in Syria.

Larijani also warned that the presence of terrorist groups in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib has many adverse consequences, calling for an immediate settlement of the issue.

On August 5, the Syrian army declared the start of an offensive against foreign-sponsored militants in Idlib. This came after those positioned in the de-escalation zone failed to honor a ceasefire brokered by Russia and Turkey and continued to target civilian neighborhoods.

Under the Sochi agreement, all militants in the demilitarized zone that surrounds Idlib, and also parts of the provinces of Aleppo and Hama, were supposed to pull out heavy arms by October 17 last year, with the Takfiri groups having to withdraw two days earlier.

The National Front for the Liberation of Syria is the main Turkish-backed militant alliance in the Idlib region, but the Takfiri Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) terrorist group, which is a coalition of different factions of terror outfits largely composed of Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, holds a large part of the province and the zone.

The HTS, which is said to be in control of a large part of Idlib, has yet to announce its stance on the buffer zone deal.

Syria’s official news agency SANA said on Thursday that Syrian troops have liberated several key villages and adjoining farms during a large-scale counter-terrorism offensive in Idlib.

Official news agency SANA said troops pressed ahead with their advances in the southeastern countryside of Idlib on Thursday, and liberated strategic villages of Halban, Samaka, Tal Khatra and Khirbet Nawwaf from Takfiri terrorists.

The capture came after “intense battles” with the extremists, SANA said, noting that army soldiers inflicted heavy losses upon them and destroyed their vehicles and military hardware.