What happened in Geneva this Wednesday, in terms of finally bringing peace to Syria, could not be more significant: the first session of the Syrian Constitutional Committee. The Syrian Constitutional Committee sprang out of a resolution passed in January 2018 in Sochi, Russia, by a body called the Syrian National Dialogue Congress. The 150-strong committee…
He died like a dog.” President Trump could not have scripted a better one-liner as he got ready for his Obama bin Laden close-up in front of the whole world. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, fake caliph, ISIS/Daesh leader, the most wanted man on the planet, was “brought to justice” under Trump’s watch. The dead dog caliph…
On October 26th, the New York Times headlined “Keep the Oil’: Trump Revives Charged Slogan for New Syria Troop Mission” and opened by saying that “in recent days, Mr. Trump has settled on Syria’s oil reserves as a new rationale for appearing to reverse course and deploy hundreds of additional troops to the war-ravaged country.”…
When the US “withdrew” from Syria, Donald Trump announced that he had secured Syria’s oil from ISIS and was protecting it. Further announcements indicated the US was leaving 500 troops there and would be moving in heavy armor, this being done well outside the purview of agreements with Russia and certainly in violation of Syria’s…
US Defense Secretary Mark Esper Friday confirmed that Washington would leave military forces in Syria to maintain control of the country’s principal oil and gas fields. The Pentagon is “considering how we might reposition forces in the area in order to make sure that we secure the oil fields,” Esper said. His remarks came at…
US President Donald Trump’s baffling comments about keeping some troops in Syria to “secure the oil” suggest a confused, contradictory – and ultimately self-defeating – policy. Earlier this month, Trump appeared to have used the impending Turkish invasion to deftly cut the Gordian knot of US presence in Syria, citing it as a pretext for…
