Fact Checking the Arab Media

When former Lebanese Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour responded to questions on an interview show for NBN TV on September 19, he repeated one accusation in particular that has long been wielded by US opponents and critics, and especially the Syrian government led by President Bashar Al-Assad: “The US is stealing oil from Syria. This alone constitutes aggression.” The popularity of this charge stems in large part from the fact that US President Donald Trump essentially owned up to US forces operating inside Syria, without the permission of the UN-recognized state led by Assad, in part in order to, as he put it in 2019, “keep the oil” for US companies and allies to financially benefit. “We’re keeping the oil - remember that,” Trump declared in October 2019 at a gathering of police chiefs in Chicago, USA. “We want to keep the oil. Forty-five million dollars a month? Keep the oil. We’ve secured the oil.” As James Graham Stewart, a law professor at the University of British Columbia, pointed out to National Public Radio at the time, “[Trump] makes no mention of who owns the oil, and that seems like a fairly key question…The second question is what exactly is Trump planning to do with the oil.” It makes quite a difference, Stewart added, whether the US is securing Syria’s oil and protecting it for its true owners or taking it without the owners’ consent. “One would probably be more acceptable…The other would be a war crime.” Stewart went on to cite numerous international agreements binding the US, including the Fourth Geneva Convention, that define the taking of goods during wartime without the owner's permission as pillaging – a war crime.

Fact Check Assessment: Partially False

In the months following Trump’s bombastic admission, his administration went forward with plans to have US interests profit directly from Syria’s oil - without the consent of the Syrian government - by providing a sanctions’ exemption license for a newly formed US energy company, Delta Crescent Energy, to partner with local Kurdish entities in the extraction and then onward sale of Syrian oil. As the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank that was generally supportive of the Trump administration, observed in a May 2021 report, Trump’s team:

“...had come up with a simple if morally and legally dubious plan: help America’s Kurdish partners profit from local oil by keeping it out of the hands of the Assad regime or Islamist militias, and then helping to refine and sell it…. After decades of claims that American administrations only cared about the Middle East because of its oil, officials knew the US Army could not be seen to seize control of oil fields on Syrian territory and dictate who would profit from their riches. Several former and current U.S. officials told The Daily Beast that the United States sought to obscure the plan – despite what Trump said – even though it was the oil strategy justifying a continued US footprint in the country’s northeast.

Not only did US officials “obscure” the plan, however, they also invented “legally dubious” claims that Assad and the UN-recognized Syrian state did not in fact own the oil in the Kurdish-majority areas of Syria where Delta was set to operate. According to one academic review published in 2020 by O. E Gunnowo and F. Chidozie, the US claims to be operating legally in Syrian territory - and therefore not affected by any Syrian government claims on resources - is simply false: “The interventions of the United States of America [in Syria] are not within the confines of legality and, as such, represent a breach of international law.”

Still, there is a reasonable debate on this complex question of the legality of the US military presence in Syria (although our review of the available expert opinion on the subject tends towards viewing the US as violating international law). But resolving this issue is actually irrelevant to the fact check at hand: Whether Mansour’s charge is accurate that the US is currently “stealing oil from Syria.” Indeed, had Mansour given the same interview one year prior, a far more extensive fact check would have been necessary, delving deeper into the key question of whether the US or US companies were illegally profiting from the control and sale of Syrian oil. However, in December, 2021, the new Biden administration decided to end Delta’s exemption, effectively ending the presence and operation of the only USD company profiting from - or extracting - Syrian oil.

As such, Mansour seems to have a sound basis to argue that the US formerly stole Syrian oil - again, a wider fact check would be necessary to draw this out further - but as of September 2022, his assertion is incorrect as no US company is involved in oil extraction in Syria. Given that the difference is a matter of phrasing around the temporality of the charge, however, we think the reader is best served by labeling his claim “Partially False” in order to reflect the likely, though previous factual basis upon which his exaggerated claim is made.