The Syrian Arab News Agency reported recently that US troops illegally transported oil tankers and trucks carrying weapons from Syria to Iraq, which made Syrian Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Bassam Tomeh's earlier words go viral again: "Americans and their allies are targeting the Syrian oil wealth and its tankers just like pirates".

It is good that Syria realized that the United States and its allies have been targeting global oil wealth. However, the US has been seeking oil since the middle of the last century, ever since every family there got a car.

It was for oil that the US has incited one proxy war after another; funded terrorist organizations in the Middle East; and concocted the "weapons of mass destruction" lie to launch a war against Iraq in 2003, causing heavy casualties on both sides.

For them the Middle East is nothing more than a place producing oil; the people there, their culture, traditions and history hardly matter.

The world has paid too heavy a price for the oil that the US-led West needs. The West installs puppet regimes in the Middle East, but they keep fighting among themselves, bringing suffering to the people. The West has funded terrorist organizations that have grown to become demons they can't control. The West invaded Iraq, and the country remains in ruins today.

Where there is oil, there are US troops. Where there are US troops, there is nothing else.

Actually, for centuries the West has been exploiting global resources. Since the 1500s, they have been constantly "discovering" and conquering new colonies, for anything from rubber to sugar, or coal to oil. In the process, tens of millions of Africans were turned into slaves and hundreds of millions were killed.