Militias in Syria worry about U.S. pullout

A mortar blast shook the rooftop where Hunter Pugh stood watch over the last stretch of Syria controlled by the Islamic State, and he scanned the winter dawn, trying to decide whether it had been outgoing fire or an attack zeroing in on his post. The answer came from a second mortar round hitting even closer. Then a third and fourth.

But before he could scramble for cover, a missile from an unseen U.S. fighter jet shot over his head and slammed into a distant courtyard, reducing the Islamic State mortar team to an exclamation point of dust and smoke. Once again, the might of the U.S.-led military coalition had come to his rescue.

Pugh is not an American soldier. He is a 25-year-old cook from Pennsylvania who traded his spatula for a Kalashnikov eight months ago and went to Syria to fight the Islamic State as a volunteer for a Kurdish militia, as hundreds of civilians from Western nations have done in recent years.

Through the grinding battle to reclaim northeastern Syria from militant control, the volunteers and the militias they joined have received crucial protection and support from the U.S military. But the Trump administration is now considering a swift withdrawal from Syria — and American volunteers like Pugh are worried about where that will leave them.

“The coalition pretty much has our backs — they are really the dominating force here,” Pugh said in a telephone interview, with sporadic machine-gun fire and explosions audible in the background. “It’s anyone’s guess what happens when the U.S. pulls out.”

With Islamic State-held territory reduced to a few villages, the tangled conflict in northeastern Syria is moving toward a new and uncertain phase. Experts say Turkish forces hostile to the Kurds, no longer restrained by an American presence, could sweep in from the north. Syrian government troops backed by Russia and Iran might drive from the west. Rival anti-Islamic State militias could squabble or shift allegiances. And the scattering of American volunteers could be caught in the middle.

“You could potentially have one ally firing on another,” said Amanda Sloat, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former State Department official who specialized in the region. “The U.S. pulling out creates a huge potential for chaos.”

Of the Western civilians who have gone to Syria as volunteers over the years, a radicalized few joined the Islamic State or other militant groups. But many others went to fight against the Islamic State — most often by joining one of the United States’ most reliable allies in the region, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, known as the YPG. Pugh’s squad on the rooftop that morning included a welder from Arizona, a steelworker from Canada and a motorcycle mechanic from Texas.

Pugh and other American volunteers estimate that about 30 foreigners are now embedded with the YPG, the dominant group in the Syrian Democratic Forces alliance fighting the Islamic State. (The militia did not respond to requests for an official count.)

Some are military veterans looking to settle unfinished scores; others are an eccentric breed of war tourist seeking a thrill. Still others are left-leaning idealists attracted by the Kurds’ talk of creating a socialist democracy called Rojava, with workers’ cooperatives and a constitution that recognizes environmental sustainability, religious freedom and gender equality.

“I’ve always hated capitalism and materialism,” said Warren Stoddard, a 24-year-old from San Marcos, Texas, who joined the same infantry squad as Pugh. “What the Kurds are doing fits with what I believe.”