Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Goal for U.S. to pull out of Syria said to be in six months
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is scaling back U.S. goals in Syria as he pushes for a quick military withdrawal, administration officials said Wednesday, abandoning plans to stay long-term to stabilize the country and prevent the Islamic State militant group from re-emerging.
Trump has given no formal order to pull out the 2,000 U.S. troops currently in Syria, nor has he offered a public timetable other than to say the United States will pull out as soon as the last remaining Islamic State fighters can be vanquished. But Trump has signaled to his advisers that, ideally, he wants all troops out within six months, according to three U.S. officials — a finale that would come shortly before the U.S. midterm elections.
In his haste to withdraw from Syria, Trump stands alone. The Pentagon, the State Department and CIA have all expressed concerns about the potential ramifications if the U.S. leaves behind a power vacuum in Syria, as have Israel, Arab leaders and other nations in the U.S.-led coalition that has fought the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria since 2014.
The president made clear his patience was running out as he met Tuesday with top national security aides. Yet the meeting concluded with no hard-and-fast deadline handed down, leaving Trump’s team struggling to deduce how fast is fast enough for Trump, according to officials briefed on the meeting who weren’t authorized to discuss it and requested anonymity.
The disagreement between Trump and his team has played out in increasingly public fashion. On Tuesday, before the Syria meeting, Trump said before television cameras that he wanted to “get out,” just as the U.S. special envoy for fighting the Islamic State insisted “our mission isn’t over.” And on Wednesday, the White House issued a statement that declared the Islamic State mission is “coming to a rapid end” but avoided specifics.
“We will continue to consult with our allies and friends regarding future plans,” said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Urging him to slow down, Trump’s aides have been emphasizing that Islamic State fighters remain active in Syria, evidence that Trump’s own, publicly stated objective — the total defeat of the Islamic State — has yet to be met.
Officials said the U.S. is tracking two pockets where the militant group remains viable — one in the Middle Euphrates Valley Region, another along the Iraq-Syria border. And despite the White House’s insistence that the group is “almost completely defeated,” a string of renewed Islamic State attacks in recent weeks has raised fears about a resurgence.
Gen. Joseph Votel, head of U.S. Central Command, agreed that “a lot of very good military progress has been made” but said “the hard part, I think, is in front of us.”
Speaking Tuesday at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Votel described the military’s counter-Islamic State mission as including “stabilizing, consolidating gains” and “addressing long-term issues of reconstruction” along with U.S. diplomatic and nonmilitary aid efforts.
Regardless of exactly when the troops leave, the decision to remove them as soon as possible has forced an immediate realignment of longterm U.S. objectives in the country, officials said.
With no military presence to ensure security for American personnel, the U.S. will have to call off other planned operations to clear land mines, restore basic services such as water and electricity, and create political conditions needed to resolve Syria’s civil war. Already, Trump has put an indefinite hold on $200 million he pledged previously for those operations.
Those efforts by U.S. diplomats and aid workers have been seen as critical to ensuring that Syria’s territory isn’t exploited in the future by Islamic State remnants, other extremists or Iran. They formed a key component of Trump’s new Syria strategy, laid out by then- Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in a speech in January declaring it “vital for the United States to remain engaged in Syria.” But the speech, while formally approved by the White House, angered Trump, officials said. The president fired Tillerson last month.
Instead, Trump will leave stabilizing Syria to other nations, in line with his long-stated view that the United States shoulders too much of global costs and should put “America first.”
“I want to get out,” Trump said Tuesday. “I want to bring our troops back home. I want to start rebuilding our nation.”
RUSSIA, TURKEY, IRAN
As the White House was talking up a U.S. withdrawal on Wednesday, the leaders of Russia, Turkey and Iran were meeting in Ankara to hash out their own plans for Syria’s future, including a continued Turkish operation to oust U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters from northern Syria.
The three nations have been pushing their own diplomatic track for resolving Syria’s civil war, even as the U.S. tries to rejuvenate United Nations-led talks.
“We have agreed to expand the entire range of our trilateral cooperation in Syria,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in the Turkish capital, claiming credit on the trio’s behalf for the Islamic State’s near-defeat.
Russia has been propping up Syrian President Bashar Assad for years, with increasing help from Iranian-backed Shiite militias such as Hezbollah — to the dismay of U.S. allies such as Israel. A phone call Wednesday between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu grew tense because of the Israeli leader’s concerns that the U.S. will withdraw and allow Israel’s enemies to gain a further foothold in a neighboring country, two U.S. officials said.
It is not clear whether the U.S. has capable local partners lined up to handle basic security and prevent a total collapse after a precipitous U.S. pullout — a prospect that offers unsettling echoes of the 2011 U. S. withdrawal from Iraq. As a candidate, Trump derided President Barack Obama for that decision and argued that the resulting power vacuum enabled the formation of the Islamic State.
The Syrian Kurds, the most effective fighting force in Syria aligned with Washington, recently shifted to fighting Turkish forces in the area of Afrin. That forced a pause in operations against the main Islamic State holdout in Syria. The Pentagon has warned that the distraction could give the militants the reprieve they need to regroup after four years of being pummeled.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for his part, said Wednesday that his military “won’t stop” trying to oust the Syrian Kurdish fighters from northern Syria.
Speaking at a joint news conference, Erdogan said Turkish troops, which last month took control of the northwestern Kurdish enclave of Afrin, would move eastward into Manbij and other areas controlled by the U.S.-backed Kurdish militia, the People’s Protection Units, which Turkey considers to be terrorists.
“I say here once again that we will not stop until we have made safe all areas controlled by the [People’s Protection Units], starting with Manbij,” Erdogan said.
He stressed that Turkey’s fight against the group would not distract from efforts to eliminate remnants of the Islamic State from the country.
Asked about a possible U.S. pullout, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani suggested that the U.S. threat to withdraw from Syria was an excuse for soliciting money from countries that want U.S. forces to remain there.
“One day they say they want to pull out of Syria. … Then it turns out that they are craving money,” he said. “They have told Arab countries to give them money to remain in Syria.”
Rouhani did not specify what he was referring to, but Trump in recent weeks has asked Saudi Arabia, which is keenly interested in keeping Iran out of Syria, to contribute $4 billion for reconstruction in the war-torn country, according to a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the conversations publicly.
Trump came away from a phone call Monday with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman confident that the king will agree to give the money, two U.S. officials briefed on the conversation said. The Saudi Embassy in Washington did not immediately comment.
Securing foreign dollars while pulling out troops could allow Trump to argue before the November midterms that he’s shifted the burden of resolving far-flung crises away from America. But ceding influence over Syrian territory could hand more control to countries whose interests in the Middle East are sharply at odds with the United States.
Trump’s decision comes as his national security team is in flux and has been divided over what to do in Syria. The president ousted Tillerson, last month and his national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, is soon to depart after Trump decided to replace him with John Bolton.