ISIS defeated? Tell that to families of the fallen
A month ago, when President Donald Trump abruptly announced plans to withdraw 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria, he declared that “we have defeated ISIS in Syria.”
The terrorists, it seems, didn’t get the message.
The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for last week’s suicide bombing in northern Syria that killed four Americans — Green Beret Jonathan Farmer, 37; Navy Chief Cryptologic Technician Shannon Kent, 35; U.S. interpreter Ghadir Taher, 27; Defense analyst Scott Wirtz, 42 — and wounded three others.
The attack at a restaurant in Manbij highlights the deadly stakes that remain on a battlefield where, as the saying goes, the enemy has a vote. Apart from showing his hand on military plans in a war zone — something Trump the candidate said he would never do — the president’s Syria policy has since devolved into confusion.
The troops would be gone in 30 days. Then it was four months. Then it was indefinite as national security adviser John Bolton set strict preconditions. Then, suddenly, U.S. military equipment (though not yet troops) began being pulled out.
“The president’s decision to leave Syria was made without deliberation, consultation with allies or Congress, assessment of risk, or appreciation of facts,” Brett McGurk, former special presidential envoy to the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS, wrote in Sunday’s Washington Post. McGurk resigned to protest Trump’s move, as did Defense Secretary James Mattis.
Though the suicide bombing appears to upend Trump’s claims of mission accomplished, new reports of lives returning to normalcy in Syrian towns liberated from the depravity of ISIS rule argue more persuasively against precipitous withdrawal.
Thanks to a U.S.-led coalition, with ground security provided by thousands of Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighters, commerce is re-emerging and fair governance is taking root. A girls’ school has opened in Manbij. A women’s council has been formed in Raqqa, the former ISIS capital. Rubble is being removed and villagers are returning home across a swath of freed Syria, a region Trump has dismissed as merely a place of “sand and death.”
It’s far from that.
“U.S. policy in northeast Syria is working,” Gayle Tzemach Lemmon wrote in Foreign Affairs after a visit to Raqqa last year. “A modest investment of U.S. tax dollars has allowed a fragile stability to hold in a place that once served as the capital of extremism.”
The Islamic State hasn’t been defeated: It has gone underground with “sleeper cells” across northeastern Syria. Witness the bombing in Manbij.
A key bulwark against the terrorist organization’s rebirth is a civil society offering young people hope and alternatives to extremism. That work has only just begun.
The United States will and should leave Syria some day. But it shouldn’t be in such a rush as to squander what has been so expensively won.