Russia on Saturday accused the United States of "international banditry" after Washington announced its intention to protect Syria's oilfields which are controlled by Kurdish forces.   

The statement comes after U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said U.S. troops were reinforcing their positions, including with mechanized forces, in Deir Ezzor, the country's largest oilfields, near the Iraqi border.   

Their mission will be to prevent ISIL from gaining access to oilfields and securing "resources that may allow them to strike within the region, to strike Europe, to strike the United States," Esper told reporters on a visit to Brussels.   

Some 200 U.S. troops are currently stationed there.   

"What Washington is currently doing - seizing and placing under control the oilfields of eastern Syria - is simply international banditry," Russia's defense ministry said in a statement.   

It said all hydrocarbon deposits in Syria do not belong to ISIL and "even less to U.S. defenders against ISIL, but exclusively to the Syrian Arab Republic." 

President Donald Trump announced last week that the U.S. would pull all of its troops out from northern Syria, where they had served as a buffer between the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), government forces and Turkish troops. 

But on Wednesday, Trump said a few U.S. troops would be staying behind to protect oilfields. 

Meanwhile, Russia sent about 300 more military police and more than 20 armored vehicles to Syria on Friday under an accord between Ankara and Moscow that has halted Turkey’s military incursion into northeast Syria. 

"The deployment of our forces and hardware as well as the forces and hardware of the Syrian border guards is currently taking place in the delineated zones," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.