San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Senior U.S. envoy resigns in protest of troop pullout
Brett McGurk, the U.S. envoy to the global coalition fighting the Islamic State group, has resigned in protest over President Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, joining Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in an administration exodus of experienced national security figures.
Only 11 days ago, McGurk had said it would be “reckless” to consider Islamic State defeated and therefore would be unwise to bring American forces home. McGurk decided to speed up his original plan to leave his post in mid-February.
“The recent decision by the president came as a shock and was a complete reversal of policy,” he said in an email to his staff viewed by the Associated Press. “It left our coalition partners confused and our fighting partners bewildered with no plan in place.”
Appointed to the post by President Barack Obama in 2015 and retained by Trump, McGurk said in his resignation letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that the militants were on the run, but not yet defeated, and that the premature pullout of U.S. forces from Syria would create the conditions that gave rise to Islamic State.
The resignation letter to Pompeo was submitted Friday and described to the AP on Saturday by an official familiar with its contents. The official spoke on condition of anonymity.
Trump played down the development, tweeting Saturday night that “I do not know” the envoy and it’s a “nothing event.” He noted McGurk planned to leave soon anyway and added: “Grandstander?”
Shortly after news of McGurk’s resignation broke, Trump again defended his decision to pull all of the roughly 2,000 U.S. forces from Syria in the coming weeks.
“We were originally going to be there for three months, and that was seven years ago — we never left,” Trump tweeted. “When I became President, ISIS was going wild. Now ISIS is largely defeated and other local countries, including Turkey, should be able to easily take care of whatever remains. We’re coming home!”
Although the civil war in Syria has gone on since 2011, the U.S. did not begin launching air strikes against Islamic State militants until September 2014, and American troops did not go into Syria until 2015.
Trump’s declaration of victory has been contradicted by his own experts’ assessments, and his decision to pull troops out was widely denounced by members of Congress.
Among key concerns is that a U.S. pullout will leave U.S.backed Syrian Democratic Forces vulnerable to attacks by Turkey, the Syrian government and remaining militant fighters.
Matthew Lee is an Associated Press writer.