U.S. gear, but no troops, exits Syria amid confusion

The U.S. military has started withdrawing some equipment, but not yet troops, from Syria as part of President Donald Trump’s order to wind down that battleground against the Islamic State group, two Defense Department officials said Friday amid continuing confusion over plans to disengage from one of the Middle East’s most complex conflicts.

The officials said the number of U.S. troops might actually increase slightly in Syria, to help protect the final process of pulling out — an operation that is still expected to take at least four to six months to complete. There are currently about 2,000 troops — mostly Army soldiers and Marines — in northeast Syria or in the Middle Euphrates River Valley to oust the remaining pockets of Islamic State fighters and secure newly liberated areas from their return.

A vaguely worded statement from the U.S. military headquarters in Baghdad, which is overseeing the fight against the Islamic State, said the withdrawal process from Syria had begun. Last month, officials said, Trump said he intended to pull out U.S. troops within 30 days.

But as recently as Sunday, the White House national security adviser, John Bolton, had said the pullout was conditional — based on circumstances that could leave U.S. forces there for months or even years.

The surprise announcement Friday, from Col. Sean Ryan, the spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State, gave no indication of whether any troops were being pulled out or whether the United States was taking other measures that could be considered a withdrawal.

Ryan said the coalition had “begun the process of our deliberate withdrawal from Syria,” adding he would provide no further information about “specific timelines, locations or troop movements.”

The announcement, coming days after Bolton’s remarks, added to a climate of chaos surrounding Washington’s policy on Syria at a time when Turkey has threatened to invade the country.

Trump has made no secret of his desire to bring the troops home, saying that they were sent to fight the Islamic State and that their mission has nearly been accomplished. In an apparently snap decision after a telephone call with the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, he said last month that he wanted the troops out within a month.

That decision prompted the resignation of two top aides — Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Brett McGurk, the special presidential envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State — and the reformulation by Bolton, a hawkish adviser whose principal Middle East aim is to contain the ambitions of Iran, which is entrenched in Syria.

Reflecting the confusion, Interfax reported that the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, said in Moscow on Friday that the U.S. military’s announcement added to the Kremlin’s growing doubts that the United States would soon withdraw from Syria.

It seems like Washington “is looking for a reason to stay,” she said. “I cannot share your confidence that they are leaving there because we never saw an official strategy.”

The month before Trump’s decision to withdraw the troops, U.S. airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria increased sharply — evidence of the extremists’ continued threat. According to Air Force data released Friday, U.S. bombers conducted 1,424 strikes in November, a more than 60 percent increase from the month before.

Additionally, the group Airwars reported that 221 civilians were killed by the U.S.-led air campaign in November — an increase in casualties similar to the number of civilians who died in the bloody culmination of the battle of the northern Syria city of Raqqa in October 2017. Airwars independently tracks civilian casualties in Syria.