The US House of Representatives votes down troops’ pull-out from Syria at a time when Senate repeals the vote to end Iraq war authorization.
The US House of Representatives voted down legislation on Wednesday, instructing US President Joe Biden to end the US occupation of the Syrian Al-Tanaf region and remove approximately 900 troops.
The resolution, initially introduced by the Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz, was supported by only 103 members of Congress, as the majority of members of Congress, amounting to 321, have voted against the pull-out.
Gaetz argued that he did not believe that “what stands between a caliphate and not a caliphate are the 900 Americans who have been sent to this hellscape with no definition of victory.”
Moreover, the representative said that “Syria is my lead-off hitter. We’re going to take a trip around the globe. We may go to Yemen, we may have stops in Niger, we may have stops in Sudan, maybe ultimately, we’ll end in Ukraine.”
In contrast, Texas Representative Michael McCaul and the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs falsely claimed that the “Withdrawal of this legal, authorized US troop deployment must be based on the total defeat of ISIS.”
Republican Montana Representative, Ryan Zinke, said “The hard truth is this, either we fight them in Syria, or we’ll fight them here,” adding “Either we fight and defeat them in Syria, or we’ll fight them in the streets of our nation.”
In turn, New York Democrat Representative, Gregory Meeks, stated that he opposed the indefinite presence of US troops in Syria, but Meeks believed that “This measure forces a premature end to our mission at a critical time for our efforts.”
Washington Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat who voted in support of the legislation, said that the bedrock of the measure was to accentuate that it is the Congress’ job to “determine where and when we go to war, take on hostilities.”
In the end, 56 out of 156 Democratic legislators voted in favor of the bill, while, on the other hand, 47 Republicans supported the measure, and 171 voted against it.
Significantly, The Obama administration’s ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, a leading voice in favor of aggressively confronting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at the time, also voted in support of the measure put forward by Gaetz.
In a letter addressing Congress, Ford explained that “After more than eight years of military operations in Syria there is no definition of what the ‘enduring’ defeat of ISIS would look like,” adding that “We owe our soldiers serving there in harm’s way a serious debate about whether their mission is, in fact, achievable.”
In doing so, Ford once again questions the role of occupation US forces in Syria.
It is worth reminding that earlier, The Cradle news website carried out an extensive investigation, unraveling the detailed looting operation by the US and its proxy militia, the SDF, of the sovereign country’s resources through illegal border crossings into the Iraqi Kurdistan Region.
The investigation report cited the Syrian Oil Ministry, which stated that US occupation forces stole over 80 percent of Syria’s daily oil production, which comes close to “66,000 barrels of oil every single day.”
Source; Allmayadeen
