Iran’s Larijani Slams Trump’s Remarks on Syria Oil
Addressing an open session of the parliament on Sunday, Larijani said it shows the US care nothing about the people of the region but what matters to the US leaders is the region’s oil.
Earlier this week, Russia slammed US President Donald Trump's plan to deploy troops into Syrian oil fields as “criminal activity,” accusing Washington of seeking to smuggle out oil worth over “$30 million” per month.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the US was “pumping oil out of northeastern Syria” while masking “its criminal activity by some pretexts of a struggle against the Daesh terrorist group.”
It came after Washington reversed an earlier decision to pull out all troops from northeastern Syria, announcing last week the deployment of about 500 troops to the oil fields controlled by US-backed Kurdish forces.
Speaking earlier this week, Pentagon chief Mark Esper said the deployment will seek to secure oil resources from Daesh. Washington, he said, will use “overwhelming” force against any other actor challenging the US, including Syria’s own government.
Speaking last week, however, Trump suggested that Washington sought economic interests by controlling the oil fields.
“We want to keep the oil, and we’ll work something out with the Kurds so that they have some money, have some cashflow. Maybe we’ll have one of our big oil companies to go in and do it properly,” said Trump.
