U.S. troops to exit Syria
Critics argue Trump’s order betrays allies, cedes influence
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has ordered a withdrawal of all 2,000 U.S. ground troops from Syria within 30 days, declaring the four-year American-led war against the Islamic State militant group as largely won, officials said Wednesday.
“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” the president said in a Twitter post Wednesday morning. He offered no details on his plans for the military mission, nor a larger strategy, in Syria.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement that “we have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign.”
But Pentagon officials who had sought to talk the president out of the decision as late as Wednesday morning argued that such a move would betray Kurdish allies who have fought alongside U.S. troops in Syria and who could find themselves under attack in a military offensive now threatened by Turkey.
One U.S. official said Kurdish leaders were informed of the president’s decision Wednesday morning.
“At this time, we continue to work by, with and through our partners in the region,” Col. Rob Man-
ning, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a brief statement.
A second official said the withdrawal of troops would be phased out over several weeks and that the U.S.-led airstrike campaign against the Islamic State in Syria, which began in 2014, would continue. That official said the military hoped to rely on Kurdish fighters on the ground to help with targeting.
Officials discussed the emerging policy on condition of anonymity before any announcement from the White House.
Emerging from a Senate conference lunch with Vice President Mike Pence and other Republican senators, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina attacked the decision to withdraw troops from Syria.
“A lot of us were blindsided,” Graham said, likening the withdrawal to “Iraq all over again” — a reference to the Obama administration’s decision to end the military mission in Iraq in 2011. The departure of U.S. troops there allowed the deadly strengthening and spread of the Islamic State group.
“If Obama had done this, all of us would be furious,” Graham said. “If Obama had done this, we’d be going nuts right now: ‘How weak, how dangerous.’ ” He said he wanted Congress to hold hearings about the consequences of the decision, and asked why lawmakers were not notified of Trump’s order.
ISIS not fully defeated
In a series of meetings and conference calls over the past several days, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other senior national security officials have tried to dissuade Trump from a wholesale troop withdrawal, arguing that the significant national security policy shift would essentially cede foreign influence in Syria to Russia and Iran at a time when U.S. policy calls for challenging both countries.
Abandoning the U.S.-backed Kurdish allies, Pentagon officials have argued, will hamper future efforts by the United States to gain the trust of local fighters, from Afghanistan to Yemen to Somalia.
In addition, the Islamic State has not been fully vanquished from the small territory it controls on the Syrian-Iraqi border. The Islamic State has held that territory for more than a year in the face of attacks by U.S.-allied forces, and has used it as a launch pad to carry out attacks in Iraq and Syria.
Less than a week ago, Brett McGurk, the U.S. envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State, said continuing to train Syrian security forces as U.S. troops are doing, “will take some time.”
“The military mission is the enduring defeat of ISIS,” McGurk told reporters Dec. 11. “We have obviously learned a lot of lessons in the past, so we know that once the physical space is defeated, we can’t just pick up and leave. So we’re prepared to make sure that we do all we can to ensure this is enduring.”
“Nobody is declaring a mission accomplished,” he said.
But Trump promised during his presidential campaign to withdraw American troops from Syria, and has been looking for a way out since. He reluctantly agreed in April to give the Defense Department more time to finish the mission.
Turkey plans offensive
In recent days, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has given Trump just such a possible path: Erdogan has vowed to launch a new offensive against the Kurdish troops that the United States has equipped to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
As the debate over withdrawing from Syria was raging inside the White House over recent days, Trump argued that the risk of a Turkish incursion could be a threat to the U.S. forces in Syria, officials said, although Erdogan would likely face huge reprisals if Turkish troops killed or wounded any Americans.
On Monday, Erdogan said he told Trump that Turkey would launch its offensive soon.
Turkey considers the American-backed Kurdish forces to be a terrorist group because of their connection to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a Kurdish insurgency in the region. The Syrian Kurds hope to create an autonomous region in northeast Syria, similar to the one in neighboring Iraq. They now control around 30 percent of Syria’s territory.
Pentagon officials have been pushing for a diplomatic solution to the issue.
The Islamic State group, also known as ISIS, has lost nearly all of its territory in Iraq and Syria, where the 2,000 American troops are mostly advising a militia made up of Kurdish and Arab soldiers.
“A lot of us were blindsided. … If Obama had done this, we’d be going nuts right now: ‘How weak, how dangerous.’ ” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.