Trump team meeting will discuss options on defeat of ISIL and Syria exit
Donald Trump’s national security team will meet today to discuss options in the Syria conflict and how to ensure the defeat of ISIL, days after the US president said American soldiers would be “coming out of Syria very soon”.
The meeting follows the deaths of an American and a British soldier in a bombing last Thursday in Manbij, the northern Syrian town where some of the about 2,000 US troops in the country are stationed. The two men were on a “classified mission to kill or capture a known ISIL member”, CNN reported, quoting the US military.
A state department official told The National that any withdrawal would depend on defeating ISIL. The official declined to say whether there would be changes in the US mission or what Mr Trump meant by “very soon” but insisted that the plan remained to focus on ISIL.
“The president has made clear, and repeated this last week, that we are in Syria to defeat ISIL and that their enduring defeat remains a top priority,” the official said.
America’s defence department warned last month about the effect Turkey’s military campaign against US-allied Syrian Kurdish forces in Syria’s Afrin region would have on efforts to defeat ISIL.
“We ... would like to see an end to the hostilities before ISIL has the opportunity to regroup in eastern Syria,” spokesman Col Rob Manning said.
Tobias Schneider, a research fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin, told
The National that from the logistical side, “the US military footprint in Syria remains relatively light and could probably be abandoned in no time”.
The US presence is limited to north-east Syria with a defined mission to protect its proxies and defeat ISIL, Mr Schneider said.
But a withdrawal could have a significant effect on the US-trained force fighting ISIL, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, and could help President Bashar Al Assad’s regime, Iran and Russia, he said.
“A sudden US withdrawal would be likely to set off a chain reaction across northeast Syria that would probably culminate in the dissolution of the military and political coalition America had so painstakingly built over the preceding four years,” Mr Schneider said.
A more managed transition, however, “in which the US sticks around long enough for its local partners to negotiate an interim agreement with Damascus, could minimise bloodshed but not fundamentally change the eventual outcome”.
“The immediate chief benefactor of a US withdrawal from the north-east would be Al Assad and his allies – including Iran”, Mr Schneider said.
“Apart from reasserting sovereignty, Mr Al Assad would also recover important agricultural land and oil fields, the proceeds of which he will eventually need to feed and finance his still teetering regime.”
While Senator Lindsey Graham and regional leaders including Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have urged the US not to pull out from Syria, the American mission is murky owing to loose objectives, Mr Schneider said.
“With the terror group close to defeat, America now finds itself alone, without friends, holding on to swaths of land smack in the middle of a region and a conflict that has grown no less complicated or dangerous in the intervening years,” he said.