U.S. renews missions against ISIS in Syria

Large-scale work returns 2 months after Trump’s order to pull out troops

MANAMA, Bahrain — U.S. troops have resumed largescale counterterrorism missions against the Islamic State group in northern Syria, military officials said, nearly two months after President Donald Trump’s abrupt order to withdraw U.S. troops opened the way for a bloody Turkish crossborder offensive.

U.S.-backed operations against Islamic State fighters in the area effectively ground to a halt for weeks despite warnings from intelligence analysts that the militants were beginning to make a comeback from Syrian desert redoubts even though their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had been killed during a U.S. raid Oct. 26.

On Friday, U.S. soldiers and hundreds of Syrian Kurdish fighters reunited to conduct what the Pentagon said was a large-scale mission to kill and capture Islamic

State fighters in Deir el-Zour province, about 120 miles south of the Turkish border.

“Over the next days and weeks, the pace will pick back up against remnants of ISIS,” Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie, the commander of the military’s Central Command, told reporters on the sidelines of the Manama Dialogue security conference in Bahrain on Saturday, using an alternative name for the Islamic State.

The resumption of extensive counterterrorism operations capped a tumultuous two months in which many of the nearly 1,000 U.S. troops in northeastern Syria flew or drove out of the country under Trump’s withdrawal order. Separately, several hundred other troops, some with armored Bradley Fighting Vehicles, arrived from Iraq and Kuwait under a subsequent order from Trump to protect Syria’s eastern oil fields from the Islamic State, as well as from the Syrian government and its Russian partners.

McKenzie said that when the dust settles on all the troop movements, he would have about 500 U.S. forces, or half of what he had before Trump’s directives, operating in an area east of the Euphrates River and Deir el-Zour, north to al-Hasakah and into Syria’s far northeast along the border with Iraq.

U.S. commandos and their Syrian Kurdish partners conducted some lowlevel missions after the withdrawal order. But now that Americans and Kurds had regrouped their joint operations in the much smaller area, McKenzie said, they could resume bigger missions against the Islamic State.

“What we’re talking about are the pockets of people who represent the wreckage that followed in the wake of the caliphate,” McKenzie said in describing what was left of the Islamic State’s religious state that at its peak was the size of Britain. “They still have the power to injure, still have the power to cause violence.”

The operation Friday in Deir el-Zour province against several Islamic State compounds killed or wounded “multiple” Islamic State fighters and resulted in the capture of more than a dozen others, according to a statement from the U.S. military coalition in Baghdad, which oversees the operations in Syria.