WASHINGTON (Dispatches) – The Biden administration has said it is taking a wait-and-see approach to the new regime in Syria, with diplomats in recent weeks holding initial meetings with the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) head, and the country’s de facto leader, Muhammad al-Julani, as well as the newly appointed foreign minister Asaad al-Shibani.
But since militants toppled longtime leader Bashar al-Assad in early December, the U.S. has maintained it will keep its deployment of troops in northeast Syria, where U.S. personnel continue to support Kurdish SDF militants. 
In fact, the Pentagon in December updated the number of personnel it said were present in the country, saying the number was actually 2,000, not the 900 it had for years reported.
Joshua Landis, the director of the Center of Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, described the update as a not-so-subtle message to various actors in Syria to take a cautious approach towards the SDF and the sprawling, economically significant, territory the group controls as the country’s future takes shapes.
It also underscores how the U.S., at least in the waning days of the Biden administration before President-elect Donald Trump takes office on January 20, will seek to assert its leverage in forming a new Syria, in part, through having boots on the ground.
“It was a signal to Turkiye, I think, and to the Arab forces that they shouldn’t be attacking the Kurdish region,” Landis said, in reference to the territory the SDF controls, which has a Kurdish population.
“It was meant to draw a line that this is something to be negotiated, and it’s not something to work out on the battlefield.”
Turkey said Monday that it was “only a matter of time” before Kurdish militants will be wiped out.
“Conditions in Syria have changed. We believe it’s only a matter of time before PKK/YPG is eliminated,” Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan told a news conference in the capital Ankara.
Turkey sees the People’s Protection Units (YPG) – the main component of the U.S.-backed SDF – as a terror group linked to its outlawed domestic foe the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Fidan warned against any Western support for Kurdish militants in Syria.
“If you (the West) have different aims in the region, if you want to serve another policy by using Daesh as an excuse to embolden the PKK, then there is no way for that either,” he said.
Turkey has long been rankled by the U.S.’ support for the SDF in northern Syria.
Al-Julani, whose HTS group has long had ties with Turkey, told Al Arabiya TV on Sunday that the Kurdish-led forces should be integrated into the national army.
On January 2, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that the U.S. military appeared to be bolstering its bases in the region, including, according to the monitor’s sources, building a new base in Ain al-Arab.  
Muhammad Salih, a senior fellow at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, said there are indeed several unspoken strategic interests behind the U.S. troop deployment.  
The SDF currently controls a large swath of northeast Syria, accounting for nearly a third of the country’s overall territory. The land it controls contains about 70 percent of Syria’s oil and gas fields.
In combination with relief from the crushing U.S. and foreign sanctions imposed on areas controlled by Assad during his rule, control of those oil fields will be essential for Syria’s future economic development. Al-Julani and al-Shibani have made that development the main emphasis in their early contacts with media and foreign envoys.
“Syria needs major foreign investment in its oil industry in order to put it back online, to renovate and refurbish it,” Landis, the Center of Middle East Studies director, told Al Jazeera. “Only the Syrian government can do that because the U.S. does not have the authority to sign long term-leases with foreign governments. Neither do the Kurds, because they’re not a recognized government. Those wells belong to the Syrian government.”
The U.S. troop presence in Syria has, in part, aimed to ensure those fossil fuel fields stayed under their control.
In 2019, then-U.S. President Trump directly addressed that aim, saying during a White House news conference next to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that the U.S. had “left troops behind only for the oil”.  
Regardless of the U.S. motivation for securing the fields in recent years, their release will be a key leverage point in negotiations going forward, Landis said.
“Sanctions and oil are big bargaining chips,” Landis said.
Those negotiations will include whether the SDF will have a role in the new government. In an early sign of cooperation, Julani met with SDF delegates last week.
Then there is the question of the pending Trump administration and what the second term of a president known for his volatility in foreign policy will spell for Syria.
Trump has sparingly weighed in on the situation. In his characteristically nebulous style, he wrote on his TruthSocial platform in early December that Syria “is not our fight”.
The statement appears to be in line with Trump’s “America First” pledges to end U.S. military involvement abroad, although his past efforts to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria stalled amid robust opposition from within his own administration.
Given his appointees this time around, Trump appears to be on a similar collision course, according to Salih.
“Figures such as the National Security adviser pick, Congressman Mike Waltz, and the secretary of a state nominee, Marco Rubio, stood strongly and very vocally against Turkish military operations against the SDF… and that the U.S. needs to maintain a military deployment inside Syria,” he said.