The United States will station additional forces in eastern Syria to protect oil fields, a defence official announced on Thursday, in another policy shift that one former senior American official called a "shocking ignorance" of history and geography.
The planned reinforcement will take place in coordination with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to prevent the oil fields from falling into the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS), the defence official said.
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"The US is committed to reinforcing our position, in coordination with our SDF partners, in north-east Syria with additional military assets to prevent those oil fields from falling back to into the hands of ISIS or other destabilising actors," the statement added.
Earlier on Thursday, US President Donald Trump said on social media that the US "will never let a reconstituted ISIS have those fields!"
The latest announcement, however, contradicts Trump controversial decision earlier this month to withdraw forces from north-east Syria, which paved the way for Turkey's operation in the area.
In an interview with Al Jazeera, Joshua Landis, a Middle East expert at the University of Oklahoma, said the announcement was "emblematic of the chaos that has set in the the American foreign policy process."
"It is in free fall and the president is going back and forth," Landis said. "This doesn't really make much sense."
The new deployment could mean that US troops would be like "sitting ducks" being stationed in an area, in which the borders are guarded by Russian and Syrian troops, he added.
"Who is going to safeguard them? The Kurds will have nothing to do with America. They have now made a deal with the Assad government. The whole thing makes no sense."
'Shocking ignorance'
Brett McGurk, the top US official leading Trump's anti-ISIL campaign until January, also criticised the latest shift in a social media post.
"The President of the United States of America appears to be calling for a mass migration of Kurds to the desert where they can resettle atop a tiny oil field. Shocking ignorance of history, geography, law, American values, human decency, and honor."
Trump had justified his earlier decision to withdraw US troops from Syria saying he sought to bring the approximately 1,000 US troops home and end US involvement there.
Trump said previously that a "small number" of US troops would remain in Syria to secure the oil fields.
However, reports from Newsweek and US broadcaster Fox said the deployment may include tanks and hundreds of soldiers.
The Turkish assault on northeastern Syria and the US-allied Kurdish forces has been halted after the US brokered a ceasefire.
Ankara also brokered a deal with Russia that saw the evacuation of Kurdish forces from an area along Syria's border with Turkey.