Pullback leaves Green Berets ‘ashamed’ and Kurdish allies describing ‘betrayal’

WASHINGTON » U.S. commandos were working alongside Kurdish forces at an outpost in eastern Syria last year when they were attacked by columns of Syrian government tanks and hundreds of troops, including Russian mercenaries. In the next hours, the Americans threw the Pentagon’s arsenal at them, including B-52 strategic bombers. The attack was stopped.

That operation, in the middle of the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State group in Syria, showed the extent to which the U.S. military was willing to protect the Syrian Kurds, its main ally on the ground.

But now, with the White House revoking protection for these Kurdish fighters, some of the Special Forces officers who battled alongside the Kurds say they feel deep remorse at orders to abandon their allies.

“They trusted us and we broke that trust,” one Army officer who has worked alongside the Kurds in northern Syria said last week in a telephone interview. “It’s a stain on the American conscience.”

“I’m ashamed,” said another officer who had also served in northern Syria. Both officers spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals from their chains of command.

And the response from the Kurds themselves was just as stark. “The worst thing in military logic and comrades in the trench is betrayal,” said Shervan Darwish, an official allied with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

The next flurry of orders from Washington, as some troops had feared, will pull U.S. troops out of northern Syria altogether.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Sunday that President Donald Trump had ordered the roughly 1,000 U.S. troops in the country’s northeast to conduct a “deliberate withdrawal” out of the country in the coming days and weeks.

The defense secretary’s statement came after comments Friday pushing back on complaints that the United States was betraying allies in Syria “We have not abandoned the Kurds” even as he acknowledged that his Turkish counterpart had ignored his plea to stop the offensive.

Army Special Forces soldiers — mostly members of the 3rd Special Forces Group — moved last week to consolidate their positions in the confines of their outposts miles from the Syrian border, a quiet withdrawal that all but confirmed the United States’ capitulation to the Turkish military’s offensive to clear Kurdish-held areas of northern Syria.

U.S. Special Forces and other troops had built close ties with their Kurdish allies, living on the same dusty compounds, sharing meals and common dangers. They fought side by side, and helped evacuate Kurdish dead and wounded from the battlefield.

“When they mourn, we mourn with them,” Gen. Joseph Votel, a former head of the military’s Central Command, said Thursday at the Middle East Institute.