Only now after the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad does Washington come clean about the actual number of American troops it has in Syria.
On Thursday, the Pentagon revealed it has roughly 2,000 troops occupying northeast Syria, home to the country's vital supply of oil and gas, which is over twice the number it has been officially disclosing for years.
US military spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said this has been the figure for a "while"—apparently long before the dramatic events of this month. Ryder claimed the he had just "learned" the true troop number.
"As you know, we have been briefing you regularly that there are approximately 900 US troops deployed to Syria. In light of the situation in Syria and the significant interest, we recently learned that those numbers were higher, and so asked to look into it. I learned today that in fact there are approximately 2,000 US troops in Syria," he said.
He then tried to pass off the discrepancy as merely a distinction between the 900 long term deployments and those forces rotating in on a more temporary basis.
"As I understand it and as it was explained to me, these additional forces are considered temporary rotational forces that deploy to meet shifting mission requirements, whereas the core 900 deployers are on longer-term deployments," Ryder said.
The Pentagon and CENTCOM have also recently been reviving talk of the 'counter-ISIS' mission as justification for keeping the US occupation ongoing. This even as NATO member Turkey has been seeking to drive out the Kurdish-led SDF from northern Syria, which the US backs.
The Biden administration has also this week said it is in direct contact with designated terror organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which holds Damascus and major cities.
Obviously this is some absurd gaslighting of the American public by the Pentagon. The question remains: why reveal it now?
The US is likely to use its possession of the oil and gas fields in Deir Ezzor, which was previously vital to meeting the Syrian population's domestic consumption needs, as leverage to get HTS leadership to fall in line with Washington's agenda for the region.
The US had long occupied the energy fields in the first place in order to tighten the economic blockade noose around Assad's neck, but ultimately it is the common people who suffer most.