Trump orders Pentagon to ready Syria withdrawal
But no date is fixed as advisers warn of risks to be resolved
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, but held off setting a date after his foreign policy advisers warned that a premature pullout from the multisided maelstrom could repeat U.S. mistakes in Iraq and give Russia and Iran even greater sway in the region.
The decision, reached at a White House meeting Tuesday, marked a compromise between Trump, who has publicly called for a rapid withdrawal of the roughly 2,000 U.S. troops now deployed in Syria, and senior Pentagon officials, who believe that Islamic State and its allies could regenerate and pose a new terrorist threat if U.S. forces leave too quickly.
The White House reignited the debate Wednesday, however, saying the U.S. military mission in Syria is “coming to a rapid end” but that the administration remains committed to elimi- A U.S. soldier takes pictures Wednesday along a road leading to the front line with Turkishbacked fighters in Manbij, north Syria. The U.S. has about 2,000 troops in Syria. nating remaining Islamic State forces.
Pushed to explain, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump wants “to focus on transitioning to local enforcement,” but he “is not going to (declare) an arbitrary timeline” on when U.S. troops will be withdrawn. The Pentagon will determine when conditions have improved enough to permit a drawdown, she said.
The policy t umult emerged as Turkey, a nominal U.S. ally and member of the NATO military alliance, hosted a summit in Ankara with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, to discuss the conflict in Syria. All three countries have troops fighting there.
In a joint statement after the meeting, the three countries lined up behind Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government in Damascus, which the U.S. opposes, saying they supported “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Syria as well as the national secu- rity of the neighboring countries.”
In a sign of the war’s complex alliances, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, recently threatened to attack U.S. forces who are supporting Syrian Kurdish guerrillas fighting Islamic State, but who Turkey considers allies of a Turkish terrorist group.
Trump, who has frequently insisted he would not “telegraph” his military plans in advance, may find it difficult to convince Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and top military commanders to set a deadline for pulling out U.S. troops.
With Iraq largely back in government hands by the end of 2016, Trump sent additional U.S. troops into Syria after he took office. But in recent briefings, he has repeatedly complained about not having a clear path to pull out of Syria once Islamic State — now mostly confined to several small pockets — is brought to heel.
That frustration came to a head this week after Trump received briefings about Islamic State losing nearly all of its Syrian territory and learned that Erdogan was hosting Russian and Iranian leaders to coordinate their actions in Syria, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
Trump’s public statements Tuesday about pulling out of Syria took his top military advisers by surprise.
“I want to get out. I want to bring our troops back home. I want to start rebuilding our nation. We will have, as of three months ago, $7 trillion in the Middle East over the last 17 years. We get nothing — nothing out of it, nothing,” he told a press conference with three visiting Baltic state leaders. “So it’s time. It’s time.”
A Brown University study estimates the actual costs of U.S. wars since 2001 is about $3.6 trillion, or about half what Trump says.
In a White House meeting later Tuesday with Mattis, outgoing national security adviser H.R. McMaster and other top aides, Trump ordered his national security team to craft plans to pull out of Syria and to push Gulf Arab allies — including Saudi Arabia — to take over responsibility for rebuilding and providing security in the country’s east, perhaps by sending their own troops.
Senior national security officials have repeatedly warned that a precipitous U.S. withdrawal would open the door for Iran and Russia to expand influence in the region and leave longtime Kurdish allies more vulnerable to a brutal Turkish crackdown.
It also would raise security concerns for Israel, which has called for stronger action to counter Iran’s presence and influence in Syria.
Some Trump advisers insisted he is attuned to those concerns.