Editor's note: Xin Ping is a commentator on international affairs who writes regularly for CGTN, Xinhua, and Global Times. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

On a road from Al-Hasakah Province in northeastern Syria to the U.S.-controlled border crossing of Al-Waleed in Iraq, a seemingly endless line of fully-loaded oil trucks of U.S. military forces move slowly across the border, disappearing into the wilderness. Meanwhile in Damascus, cars line up in front of gas stations, as locals have to wait for hours before getting refueled. The sharp contrast has been a normality in Syria, where the oil price has hiked by at least 130 percent in the month of August alone.

Satellite images reveal that from once a month to seven times a month and then to twice in 24 hours, the U.S. occupation forces have been mobilizing scores of trucks to smuggle oil from Syria's Al-Jazeera fields to U.S. military bases in Iraq. According to the Syrian oil ministry, in the first half of 2022, an average of 66,000 barrels of Syrian oil, or over 83 percent of the country's daily output, was stolen by U.S. forces and their mercenaries daily.

The theft of Syrian oil is nothing new: it has been happening for years under U.S. Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and now Joe Biden. Former President Trump revealed the reason why unwelcome U.S. military bases still remained in Syria after the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2019: "We're keeping the oil [in Syria]. We have the oil. The oil is secure. We left troops behind only for the oil." In a letter to Congress on June 8, President Biden admitted that "a small presence of U.S. Armed Forces remains in strategically significant locations in Syria to conduct operations, in partnership with indigenous ground forces." Now it has been clear why the locations are "significant" and what the "operations" refer to.

U.S. politicians claim they are preventing Syrian oil from flowing to terrorist groups, including ISIL. But if the U.S. wishes to act as the "world police"— rather than an uninvited intruder of other countries' domestic affairs — they should know the police officer's job is not to act like a thief.  

Not to mention that oil is not the only resource that the U.S. has been looting from the war-torn country. Oil, tourism and agriculture used to be the three pillars of pre-war Syria's economy. Today, the U.S. is not sparing Syrian wheat. The U.S. occupation forces have been smuggling grain out of Syria in the past few years, where 12.4 million people are facing food insecurity, according to media reports.

Punitive sanctions imposed by Washington have aggravated Syria's humanitarian conditions. On June 17, 2020, U.S. Congress extended its sanctions to most aspects of the Syrian economy in a bill ironically titled "Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act." Although Washington argued yet again that the sanctions were precisely targeted, their impact fell most heavily on ordinary Syrians. Without access to foreign trade, Syrians can't purchase the fertilizers and fuel needed for farming, irrigation and pest control. In the same year as the Act took effect, the Syrians faced hunger at a historic levels for the first time since WWI, according to the UN.

On August 24, 2022, Washington ordered its latest airstrikes to, as it claims, counter drone attacks on its occupation forces, even though today's Syria can not handle any new shocks. Its logic is like a gangster claiming the right to attack the owner of the house that he had broken into. Neither Damascus nor the UN has authorized the U.S. military presence in Syria, in the past or at present.

U.S. intervention has brought about not democracy, but chaos, and not freedom, but hunger to not only Syria, but also many other countries in the Middle East. In Afghanistan, the Biden administration still refuses to return the country's $7 billion assets even at the first anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal. In Iran, U.S. sanctions are estimated to be responsible for 13,000 COVID-19 deaths due to restrictions on vaccine imports. In Iraq, the U.S.-launched war has claimed over 209,000 civilian lives and displaced 9 million Iraqis.   

The crimes committed by the U.S. in the Middle East not only deprive local people of freedom, human rights and development opportunities, but flagrantly violate justice and the dignity of humanity. That might be the biggest irony to what the U.S. claims is the "rules-based international order."  

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