US giving Daesh safe passage in east Syria under gold deal: Local sources

The deal gave the United States “tens of tons of gold that the terror organization had stolen,” the official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported on Tuesday, citing local sources.

In return, US forces would allow the terrorists and their ringleaders to escape their hideouts in the eastern province of Dayr al-Zawr, the agency added.

The gold has been carried away from the province’s al-Baghouz area on board helicopters.

The helicopters, according to eyewitnesses, transported large boxloads of Daesh “spoils” from the al-Dashisha area in the countryside of Hasaka in northeastern Syria.

American forces have already appropriated and shipped out huge quantities of gold they had seized in Daesh’s strongholds, bringing the total amount of gold acquired and transferred to the US to around 50 tons, SANA said.

The report added that the terror outfit’s last hideouts in Dayr al-Zawr also contain millions of dollars in funds plundered by the group from across Syria and neighboring Iraq.

The latest report comes around a week after the US-led coalition transferred Daesh terrorists and their family members in 50 trucks out of Baghouz village, where the remaining Daesh elements are holed up, according to the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The terror outfit launched a campaign of bloodshed and destruction in Syria and Iraq in 2014. Later that year, the US led scores of its allies in an invasion of the two countries under the pretext of dislodging the terrorists.

Damascus objects to Washington’s military presence on its soil and has repeatedly brought its stated goal into question.

Daesh has lost all the swathes of land it had captured from the Syrian government thanks to successful army operations, which have the backing of Iran and Russia.