US to stay in Syria as long as Iran: Top oficial
Jeffrey says Washington will keep its presence as long as Tehran stays in Syria, but the US role will not necessarily involve troops; Russian trips to Syria hit peak after Putin ordered partial pullout
The United States will stay in Syria as long as rival Iran maintains its presence, but the US role will not necessarily involve troops, a senior oficial said on Thursday.
James Jeffrey, the US special representative on Syria, was clarifying recent comments by senior oficials who appeared to suggest that troops would stay indeinitely to counter Iran.
Such an objective would drastically alter the mission in Syria irst authorised by president Barack Obama who set a goal of defeating the Daesh group, which also considers Iran a foe.
Asked if President Donald Trump was making US withdrawal contingent on the removal of Iranian forces, Jeffrey told reporters on the sidelines of the United Nations: “The president wants us in Syria until that and the other conditions are met.
But he added: “’Us’ is not necessarily American boots on the ground.”
“There are many ways that we can be on the ground. We’re certainly on the ground diplomatically,” he said, while adding that no options were deinite.
“Boots on the ground have the current mission of the enduring defeat of Daesh,” he said.
The United States has some 2,000 troops in Syria, mainly training and advising both Kurdish forces and Syrian Arabs opposed to President Bashar Al Assad.
Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton, long hawkish on Iran, said on Monday on Syria: “We’re not going to leave as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders.”
Iran has been giving both direct support to Assad, a secular leader hailing from the Alawite minority sect, and backing him through the Lebanese movement Hizbollah.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, speaking to reporters on Wednesday, said Tehran was out to defeat the Daesh group and would stay as long as requested by the Syrian government.
He rejected the Trump administration’s warnings, questioning why the United States was involved militarily so far from home in the irst place.
The Trump administration has withdrawn from a deal on ending Iran’s nuclear programme and vowed to challenge Tehran’s inluence in Syria as well as Yemen and Iraq.
Russia’s presence
According to oficial igures published by a Russian security service the number of Russian civilians travelling to Syria, where Moscow is running a military operation in support of Assad, reached record levels this year.
The data does not include Russian servicemen or explain what the civilians are doing in Syria.
But the igures shed some light on the scale of Russian activities in Syria because they appear to include civilian personnel working for the military and may also relect the presence of private military contractors who, according to people familiar with the deployment, are ighting in Syria in support of regular Russian troops.
The number of Russian civilian trips to Syria grew after President Vladimir Putin announced a partial withdrawal of troops last December, an increase apparently indicating an expansion of Moscow’s activities in the country.
The numbers of departing Russian citizens are counted by destination countries and are published every quarter by the Federal Security Service (FSB), which supervises border guards, on a government statistical website.
In the irst half of this year the FSB registered more than 17,000 departures by Russians to Syria, more than in any six-month period since the Russian operation began in September 2015.
There were nearly 22,000 departures in the whole of 2016 and more than 25,000 in 2017. The number of Russians travelling to Syria may be less because some may make several trips. The FSB has published no data on Russians returning from the country.
Late last year, Putin lew to Syria to announce mission accomplished and to order the withdrawal of “a signiicant part” of Moscow’s military contingent. Russia does not disclose how many troops it has in Syria.
In August, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said more than 63,000 Russian servicemen had earned combat experience in Syria since 2015, but troop rotation means the size of the deployment remains unclear.
The number of civilian trips from Russia to Syria has risen more than 10 times since Russia started preparations for its Syria operation in mid-2015. Putin announced the Russian deployment on Sept.30 of that year.