Trump wants U.S. troops out of Syria
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 multi-sided 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 that the U.S. military mission in Syria is “coming to a rapid end” but that the administration remains committed to eliminating remaining Islamic State forces. The militants have been driven from most of the territory they once controlled in Iraq and Syria.
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to local enforcement,” but he “is not going to (declare) an arbitrary timeline” on when U.S. troops will be withdrawn.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 tumult emerged as Turkey, a nominal U.S. ally and member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 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 security of the neighboring countries.”
And in an apparent allusion to the eastern Syrian enclave controlled by the U.S. military and predominately Kurdish allies, the three leaders rejected efforts to create “new realities on the ground under the pretext of combating terrorism.”
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. Turkey considers the guerrillas to be allies of a Turkish terrorist group.
Trump, who has frequently insisted that he would not “telegraph” his military plans in advance, may find it difficult to persuade Defense Secretary James N. Mattis and top military commanders to set a deadline for pulling out U.S. troops.