On 6 December, US authorities announced that the Pentagon would resume full combat operations in northern Syria alongside its Kurdish allies. The announcement was made in light of a looming Turkish ground invasion in northern Syria, according to The Washington Post.

The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have recently stalled their joint military operations with the US against the Islamic State in Syria due to a series of Turkish air and artillery strikes on their positions.

The Turkish attacks, known as operation Claw-Sword, are a response to a bomb detonation in central Istanbul on 13 November. Turkiye blamed the attack on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and arrested over a dozen people supposedly involved in the attack.

According to officials, the US military and the SDF have only recently engaged in a few cooperative operations to transport supplies between locations and conduct security patrols.

“We are concerned with any action that may jeopardize the hard-fought gains made in security and stability in Syria,” Col. Joseph Buccino, a US military spokesman, said in a statement.

“Further, we are concerned for the security of the SDF, our vetted, recognized, and reliable partners in a place where we have withdrawn most troops,” he added.

Turkiye believes that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which both Washington and Ankara have listed as a terrorist group, is a subset of the United States’ allies in Syria, blaming the US for complicity in the attack.

Meanwhile, on 14 November, US occupation troops in Syria looted a new batch of the country’s oil from the al-Jazira region in coordination with their Kurdish proxy militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

“The American occupation forces took out a new batch of stolen Syrian oil, in 76 tankers, to their bases in northern Iraq, through the illegal Mahmoudiya crossing,” local sources told Syrian media.

One day before, US forces also looted large quantities of wheat and oil from different areas and transported them into Iraq using 94 trucks.

The US forces in Syria have consistently plundered natural resources, namely its oil. Recently, there has been a surge in Washington’s oil looting operations in Syria, given the ongoing energy crisis and the recent OPEC+ production cuts, which left the west in a state of desperation.