Aletho News

The Real Reason U.S. Troops Were In Syria

The Dissident | December 13, 2025

Recently, two U.S. soldiers stationed in Syria were killed in an ISIS attack.

The U.S. Ambassador to Türkiye and Special Envoy for Syria, Tom Barrak, “condemned the ambush on his X account, calling it a ‘cowardly terrorist attack’ and expressing condolences to the families of the fallen.”

Reuters reported that, “in a post on his Truth Social platform, U.S. President Donald Trump vowed ‘very serious retaliation,’ mourning the loss of ‘three great patriots’. He described the incident in remarks to reporters as a ‘terrible’ attack.”

But the more important question to ask is, why were American troops sent to Syria in the first place?

The official reason given, in 2015, when U.S. troops were first sent to North East Syria, was that they were sent there to train Kurdish forces in the Syrian Democratic Forces to fight ISIS.

But the real reason- as admitted years later by a U.S. official- was to deprive Syrians of their oil and wheat, in hopes it would decimate Syria and lead to regime change against then Syrian leader Bashar al Assad.

The United States in 2012 launched “Operation Timber Sycamore”, a covert CIA program that poured billions of dollars into arming and training Syrian rebels, many of whom had links to Al Qaeda, in hopes that it would lead to regime change.

This regime change program- not fighting ISIS- was the real reason for the U.S. troop presence in North East Syria.

This was outright admitted by Dana Stroul, a U.S. Pentagon official, in 2019 when she said, “the United States still had compelling forms of leverage on the table to shape an outcome that was more conducive and protective of US interests … the first one was the one-third of Syrian territory that was owned via the US military, with its local partner the Syrian Democratic Forces … that one-third of Syria is the resource-rich, it’s the economic powerhouse of Syria, so where the hydrocarbons are, which obviously is very much in the public debate here in Washington these days, as well as the agricultural powerhouse.”

Stroul admitted, “this one-third of Syrian territory that the US military and our military presence owned” was, “leverage for affecting the overall political process for the broader Syrian conflict”, noting that because of the U.S. occupation and “owning” of one third of Syria, “the rest of Syria … is rubble”.

Along with this, she boasted that U.S. sanctions on Syria had been “preventing reconstruction aid and technical expertise from going back into Syria”.

Through depriving Syria of its “resource-rich economic powerhouse” and placing crushing sanctions on the country, Stroul boasted that it would lead to regime change in Syria.

Reporting on the effect of this policy on the ground in 2023, journalist Charles Glass wrote, “Damascus reminded me of Baghdad on my many trips there between the war over Kuwait in 1991 and the American invasion in 2003. In those years the US, the EU, and the UN were enforcing similar restrictions based on their conviction that economic hardship would destabilize Saddam Hussein’s regime or compel a hungry populace to depose him. In Iraq then, as in Syria now, the regime flourished and people starved.”

This siege warfare tactic eventually helped lead to the eventual overthrow of the Assad regime last year.

Instead of threatening more U.S. intervention in Syria as a response to the ISIS attack, the U.S should reflect on the fact that it put soldiers in harm’s way in order to starve the people of Syria, and deprive them of their “economic powerhouse” as the last phase of a bloody, covert regime change war.

December 13, 2025 - Posted by aletho | Illegal Occupation | Syria, United States