Coalition going out of Syria

US: Withdrawal from war-torn country has already begun

HASAkeH (Syria):

The US-led coalition in Syria has begun withdrawing its troops, a spokesman said, less than a month after US President Donald Trump made his shock announcement.

The force which has battled the Islamic State group since 2014 started scaling down but it remained unclear how long the drawdown process would last.

“CJTF-OIR has begun the process of our deliberate withdrawal from Syria,” spokesman Col Sean Ryan said referring to the US-led anti-militant force.

“Out of concern for operational security, we will not discuss specific timelines, locations or troop movements,” he said yesterday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that the coalition had started scaling down its presence at Rmeilan airfield in the Hasakeh province in northeastern Syria.

“On Thursday, some American forces withdrew from the Rmeilan military base,” Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Britain-based monitoring organisation, said.

“This is the first such pullout of American forces since the US president’s announcement of a military withdrawal from Syria last month,” he said.

The US-led coalition has several other bases across northeastern Syria, as well as in neighbouring Iraq, where Trump has said his forces would remain.

A US defence official in Washington had earlier confirmed that equipment was being removed from Syria.

The US-led coalition, which also includes countries such as France and Britain, was formed in mid-2014 to counter the expansion of the Islamic State group after it proclaimed its self-styled “caliphate”.

Trump claimed last month that the militants had been defeated and that US troops could therefore come home and added that fighter jets and special forces played a key role in efforts to claw back the territory lost to IS.

A Kurdish-led group, the Syrian Democratic Forces, is currently flushing out the very last pockets of land controlled by the militants in the Euphrates River Valley.

The beginning of the drawdown coincided with a visit to the Middle East by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who insisted in Cairo yesterday that the withdrawal would go ahead despite widespread criticism.

Earlier this week, US National Security Adviser John Bolton laid out conditions for the pullout, including the defeat of the IS in Syria and guarantees for the safe- ty of Washington’s Kurdish allies in the campaign, who have been threatened with an imminent offensive by Turkey.

Bolton’s comments were widely seen as backtracking on Trump’s announcement, including by Turkey which described them as “unacceptable”.

The battle against die-hard militants in remote areas along the Iraqi-Syrian border and the hunt for IS supremo Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a wanted militant, could last indefinitely however.

And the Kurdish militia which has spearheaded the ground battle against the militant group is left exposed to a Turkish offensive by the US withdrawal.

The People’s Protection Units (YPG), a Syrian offshoot of the PKK group which has waged an insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984, has already started cosying up to Damascus and its Russian sponsor.

Turkey considers the YPG a terrorist organisation and has repeatedly threatened to move into Syria to create a buffer zone along the border.

Critics of Trump’s decision, including within his own Republican camp, have said that a precipitous withdrawal would shatter US policy in Syria and allow IS to rebuild.

They have also argued that it would further allow Damascus ally Iran to extend its influence across Syria and potentially threaten Israel. — AFP WARSAW: Poland has arrested a Chinese employee of Huawei and a Polish cyber business specialist on allegations of spying, state news agency PAP said, deepening the controversy over Western criticism of the Chinese telecoms equipment maker.

Polish public TV channel TVP also said security services had searched the local offices of Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, as well as the Polish offices of telecoms firm Orange.

Huawei and Orange could not immediately be reached for comment.

“The Chinese national is a businessman working in a major electronics company ... the Pole is a person known in circles associated with cyber business,” Maciej Wasik, the deputy head of Poland’s special services, said.

The arrested pair will be held for three months, PAP reported, citing the spokesperson for Poland’s head of special services.

TVP said the Polish national was a former agent of the internal security agency. The agency did not immediately respond to journalists’ requests for comment.

In December, Canadian authorities arrested a top Huawei executive, Meng Wanzhou, at the behest of the United States which alleged Huawei is linked to China’s government and that its equipment could contain “backdoors” for use by government spies. — Reuters