Over the weekend, residents of a town in Syria’s eastern desert took to the streets demanding that corrupt local officials be held to account, and that revenues garnered from nearby oil wells be used to develop their area. The Dec. 14 protest in Busayra was the latest in a series of demonstrations that began in April and swept across Deir ez-Zor province, the eastern half of which is under the control of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and remains mired in poverty despite being home to two of Syria’s largest oil fields.

Tankers filled with crude head north to Hasakah on a near-daily basis, said Mohammad al-Khalaf, the pseudonym of a journalist in Deir ez-Zor. “The tankers are still going” after Turkey’s latest incursion into northeast Syria, “from the Omar and Tanak fields to Hasakah province, and there’s an SDF force that guards the trucks,” Khalaf said Dec. 5.

Khalaf added that he does not know what happens to this oil after it arrives in Hasakah. It is likely that a portion is refined and consumed locally, and that some is shipped to the government; some might even make its way to Iraqi Kurdistan and on to Turkey as part of the trade recently detailed by Al-Monitor’s Amberin Zaman.

In addition to the tankers that head north, Syrian government middlemen purchase oil extracted from the Omar and Tanak fields and ship it in trucks to government territory through Raqqa province. A tangled web of brokers and businessmen also smuggle oil products toward Damascus across the Euphrates River, on rafts and boats.