Villagers force US military convoy to return to NE Syria base

Local people in Syrian village of Abu Qasaib in northeastern province of Hasakah stopped a US military convoy on Thursday, forcing the US troops to return to their occupied base.

The US convoy that sought to pass through the village near the city of Qamishli finally retreated, Syria’s official news agency SANA reported.

Earlier this month, a similar incident had occurred in Hamo, near Qamishli. In that incident, a convoy of five US military vehicles was heading to Hamo village, but was forced to return when locals gathered at a Syrian Army checkpoint near the village and prevented the convoy from passing, Press TV wrote on Friday.

Also in late March, local people in another border village prevented a convoy of eleven US military vehicles from passing through their village.

In the past few days, the United States has dispatched truckloads of military and logistical equipment to Syria’s Hasakah as part of its plots to seize oil reserves and plunder natural resources in the war-battered country.

On Tuesday, SANA reported that a convoy of at least 40 trucks had crossed into the Syrian territory through illegitimate border crossing of Walid, and headed toward US positions in Hamo village, west of Qamishli.

In late October 2019, Washington reversed an earlier decision to pull out all of its troops from northeastern Syria, announcing the deployment of about 500 soldiers to the oilfields controlled by Kurdish forces in the Arab country.

The US has also deployed new troops to the Ain al-Asad base in the western Iraqi province of Anbar as well as new Patriot missile systems and Counter Rocket, Artillery, and Mortar (C-RAM) systems to a number of Iraqi bases it has occupied.

Turkey sends new troops to Idlib

Turkey dispatched a new military convoy to Syria’s northwestern province of Idlib, despite a recent cease-fire deal that Ankara has signed with Moscow to halt the escalation of violence there.

The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a Turkish convoy of some 40 military vehicles entered Syrian territory on Thursday night and headed toward the Turkish observatory posts in the so-called “de-escalation zones”.

Ankara had earlier deployed nearly 6,000 troops to the de-escalation zones following the last month’s cease-fire deal with Russia.

On March 5, Russia and Turkey, which support opposite sides in the Syrian conflict, came to an agreement on a ceasefire regime in Idlib, where Turkish aggression against the Syrian government had risked sparking a war.

Under the agreement, joint Russian-Turkish patrols secure a six-kilometer-wide corridor along a highway connecting the two government-held provinces of Latakia and Aleppo.