In Syria, Milley says U.S. troops still needed to counter IS group

By day, 1st Lt. Kamal Alsawafy is providing security for Iraqi refugees as they move from the crowded alHol detention camp in northeast Syria to transportation back to Iraq. His M4 carbine strapped to his side, he is a member of a Michigan National Guard unit deployed to try to prevent the revival of the Islamic State group.

By night — 3 a.m. local time — Alsawafy is a council member on the Dearborn City Council in Michigan, teleconferencing in from his laptop at a secret U.S. military base to cast his vote for speed bumps in local neighborhoods (in favor), or more handicap accessibility for city parks (also in favor).

America still has more than 900 troops, and hundreds more contractors, in Syria, working with Kurdish fighters to make sure there is no resurgence of Islamic State, which ostensibly was defeated as a caliphate in 2019, after five years of wreaking havoc across Iraq and Syria.

But with Joe Biden's administration's focus shifting to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and a potential future conflict with China, the counter-Islamic State military mission in Syria has become something of a back-burner issue. The mission has only received greater attention when Iranianbacked militias or Islamic State militants attack the U.S. troops who rotate in and out, for nine months at a time, across a handful of bases here.

On Saturday, Gen. Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made his first visit to Syria in that role, traveling to Kurdish-controlled territory to assess the state of America's nearly 8-year-old military mission.

For Milley, the unannounced trip was a chance, he said, to figure out firsthand what value the mission in Syria still holds for U.S. security.

Milley said it was important that the United States continue to pay attention to the region even as it reorients itself toward Asia, because the terrorist threat would grow in the absence of an U.S. troop presence. “Unless you support and devote the correct amount of resources to it, things will get worse,” he said.