Loading ...What Country Just Deployed Troops To Defend Its Oil Fields Located On A Distant Continent?
Tyler Durden’s pictureSubmitted by Tyler Durden on 09/09/2014 18:49 -0400
If this was the 90s, the correct answer with 99.9% certainty, would have been unequivocally the United States. However, perhaps as a testament to how the times have changed, not to mention the geopolitics and the dominant global superpowers, the answer this time is not the US but instead China. And the country where according to the WSJ, China has deployed some 700 soldiers as part of a United Nations “peacekeeping” force, is South Sudan where the Chinese troops will help guard the country’s embattled oil fields and protect Chinese workers and installations, a spokesman for the African nation’s president said Tuesday.
More on this page straight out of the CIA’s playbook:
The airlift of the Chinese infantry battalion to the South Sudanese states of Unity and Upper Nile, the site of the only operating oil fields still under control of the central government in Juba, was expected to take several days, spokesman Ateny Wek Ateny said.
While Beijing’s troops will operate under U.N. command, their posting to South Sudan marks a sharp escalation of China’s efforts to ensure the safety of its workers and assets in Africa, and guarantee a steady flow of energy for domestic consumption.
The deployment marks the first time Beijing has contributed a battalion to a U.N. peacekeeping force, U.N. officials said. In March 2013, China sent some 300 peacekeepers to Mali to protect Chinese engineers building a U.N. camp in the town of Gao