(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Middle Eastern media are reporting the arrival of U.S. troops in recent days, fueling speculation that President Joe Biden is looking to resume a war that his predecessor, Barack Obama, began in Syria more than a decade ago.
According to reports, the troops are landing in Iraq. Officials there are telling the public that the Americans are en route to Syria.
U.S. Army Gen. Matthew McFarlane reportedly said last week that the remaining troops in Iraq and Syria are there simply to fight ISIS and other terrorists. Officially, there are still 2,500 troops in Iraq and about 900 in Syria.
However, the latest troop movements come at a time when Biden is also deploying at least 3,000 troops to the Persian Gulf to confront the Iranian navy.
The U.S. military has also reportedly readied some 2,500 light-infantry troops for deployment to Iraq and Syria in mid-July.
Given that Iran and Syria are both Russian allies, some observers suspect that Biden’s Middle Eastern deployments have less to do with fighting terrorism, and more about continuing his proxy war against Vladimir Putin.
“Due to ongoing tensions with the Russian air force operating in Syria, Washington significantly reinforced its occupation bases with heavy artillery and hundreds of fighters from their Kurdish and Sunni proxy militias,” noted The Cradle, an outlet that covers geopolitics in the Middle East and Africa.
Obama initially entangled the U.S. in Syria in 2011 via the then-secret Operation Timber Sycamore, which entailed the CIA funneling weapons and equipment to “moderate” rebels fighting against Syria’s pro-Russian government, led by President Bashar al-Assad.
As we now know, most of those “moderate” rebels turned out to be groups such as al-Qaeda’s al-Nusra Front. Moreover, many of the CIA weapons were diverted to ISIS, which is why Donald Trump said, “Obama founded ISIS,” on the campaign trail in 2015 and 2016.
When Trump took power in 2017, he sought to end the U.S. involvement in Syria—but he was resisted by the national security state at every turn.
When Trump initially ordered troops to leave Syria, it prompted the resignation of both Defense Secretary James Mattis and Brett McGuirk.
And in an act of treason, Pentagon and State Department officials frequently lied to Trump about the troop levels in Syria throughout his presidential tenure.
“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” outgoing diplomat Jim Jeffrey told Defense One in November 2020.
“When the situation in northeast Syria had been fairly stable after we defeated ISIS, [Trump] was inclined to pull out,” Jeffrey added at the time.
“In each case, we then decided to come up with five better arguments for why we needed to stay. And we succeeded both times. That’s the story.”
U.S. officials even tried to blame Assad for gassing his own people in an attempt to coax Trump into overthrowing Syria’s government. Thankfully, whistleblowers from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW, came forward to expose the U.S. deep state for engaging in essentially a false flag attack by manipulating evidence to implicate Assad in the gassing.
With Trump out of power and Biden’s proxy war in Ukraine going poorly, perhaps the pro-war regime in Washington DC is pivoting back to fighting other Russian allies in the Middle East. The Washington Post encouraged Biden to do so in an opinion column last month.
“In the past, Biden has expressed the view that the United States should lead the international diplomacy on Syria and use pressure to stop Assad from slaughtering civilians with impunity,” the Post columnist Josh Rogin said on July 6.
“Even after all this time, it’s still the right thing to do.”
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
