US Seeks Agroterrorism in Syria by Distributing Contaminated Seeds: Hasakah Governor

In an interview with Tasnim News Agency’s reporter in northeastern Syria, the governor of Hasakah, Ghassan Khalil revealed that the forces of the United States in Syria are not only busy in occupying Syrian lands, but also in supporting military and agricultural terrorism.

According to a Tasnim correspondent in Damascus, the activities of US occupying forces are not limited to the crimes against Syria and its people, from stealing oil and wheat to supporting terrorist groups and separatist militias in eastern Syria, but recently a new form of criminal activity by American has been disclosed by Syrian officials.

The latest crime in this regard is the US attempt to send modified wheat seeds for distribution to farmers in Hasakah province and the Syrian island region (the region between the Tigris and Euphrates) for free and ostensibly to help plant their land, but behind the scenes of this aid is the destruction of their lands and converting them to barren lands for many years, in some cases even for several decades.

The so-called "US Embassy in Damascus" posted a statement on its official Facebook account stating that 3,000 tons of modified wheat seeds had reached eastern Syria.

These seeds will meet the needs of hundreds of farmers in the region to produce about 32,000 tons of wheat for next year. Therefore, the need of the Syrian people for flour and bread and other wheat products that has been intensified as the result of an economic crisis caused by US sanctions and years of foreign-backed war will supposedly be met.

The strange thing about this is that the aforementioned social media page has published this announcement several times in less than two weeks, in order to persuade the Syrian farmers in the eastern regions to take these seeds from the Americans.

This issue attracted the attention of the Syrian agricultural officials, who tested the samples obtained from the US forces.

General "Ghassan Khalil", the governor of Hasakah, who forms a committee of agricultural experts to ensure about the safety of the samples revealed to Tasnim that experiments conducted by the Committee of Agricultural Experts show that the American-provided wheat seeds taken by farmers are infected with the "Anguina tritici" or "Tilletia laevis" which is a plant pathogenic nematode, as well as having "bacterial stalk rot of corn”.

"These two pests or diseases in American wheat seeds contaminate the soil and make it uncultivable, reducing the fertility of the land by more than 83 percent after sowing the modified seeds," said the Governor.

"These pests not only damage agricultural fields where American modified wheat seeds are grown, but also transfer the pest from one land to another," Khalil said.

Khalil stressed that only one of these pest-infested seeds is enough to infect a large area of ​​agricultural land, adding, “the amount of seeds modified by the American occupying forces reaches 3,000 tons, which is enough to destroy all these agricultural lands - that happened to be the main suppliers of the country's food basket - in the Syrian island region, making them uncultivable for decades.”

"They (Syrian officials) have warned farmers who received these American seeds not to plant them,” said Major General Ghassan Khalil while accusing the US military of trying to achieve Washington's nefarious political goals against Syria by distributing such contaminated seeds.

"Syrian farmers in the region responded quickly to the warnings and requests of their government and refused to plant them, even though these areas are under the control of the US occupying forces and the US-affiliated militias," he went on to say.