It’s being reported this morning that Trump, after years of fighting with the kurds against ISIS, is now considering a total withdrawal of US forces in Syria:
REUTERS – The United States is considering a total withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria as it nears the end of its campaign to retake all of the territory once held by Islamic State, U.S. officials told Reuters on Wednesday.
Such a decision, if confirmed, would upend assumptions about a longer-term U.S. military presence in Syria, which U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other senior U.S. officials had advocated to help ensure Islamic State cannot reemerge.
Still, President Donald Trump has previously expressed a strong desire to bring troops home from Syria when possible.
The timing of the withdrawal was not immediately clear and U.S. officials who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity did not disclose details about the deliberations, including who was involved. It was unclear how soon a decision could be announced.
The Pentagon and White House declined to comment.
2,000 troops…
The United States still has about 2,000 troops in Syria, many of them special operations forces working closely with an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF.
The partnership with the SDF over the past several years has led to the defeat of Islamic State in Syria but outraged NATO ally Turkey, which views Kurdish YPG forces in the alliance as an extension of a militant group fighting inside Turkey.
The deliberations on U.S. troops come as Ankara threatens a new offensive in Syria. To date, U.S. forces in Syria have been seen as a stabilizing factor in the country and have somewhat restrained Turkey’s actions against the SDF.
Winning the peace?
A complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria would still leave a sizeable U.S. military presence in the region, including about 5,200 troops across the border in Iraq.
Still, Mattis and U.S. State Department officials have long fretted about leaving Syria before a peace agreement can be reached to end that country’s brutal civil war, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced around half of Syria’s pre-war population of about 22 million.
In April, Mattis said: “We do not want to simply pull out before the diplomats have won the peace. You win the fight — and then you win the peace.”
This new offensive promised by Erdogan is that he intends to begin fighting the kurds EAST of the Euphrates. He announced it within the last couple of weeks and Yeni Safak is already talking about troop deployments:
As Turkey’s upcoming operation east of the Euphrates to eradicate the area of terrorists looms, more details regarding Ankara’s third cross-border operation in Syria continue to emerge.
A force of approximately 24,000, comprised of Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) and Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters are set to take part in the operation.
On Monday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that operation could begin “at any moment”, asserting that Turkey would never allow a “terror corridor” to be set up along its border.
But more to the point of this reporting, I found an article at Hurriyet stating that Erdogan has just spoke with Trump a few days ago about the kurds and his version of the phone call is that Trump responded positively:
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said his U.S. counterpart “responded positively” over Turkey’s demand for the YPG to retreat from Syria’s Manbij to the east of the Euphrates.
“We talked to [U.S. President Donald] Trump. He responded positively. These terrorists have to go to the east of the Euphrates. If they do not leave, we will send them. Because they are disturbing us,” he said at the mass opening ceremony at Mevlana Square in central Konya province on Dec. 17.
Erdoğan and Trump had held a phone call on Dec. 15 after Turkey announced that it will conduct a new military operation in Syria.
I don’t know what ‘responded positively’ actually means but it seems that Erdogan wants to push the Kurds, who the US has been allied with in Manbij, into the area in which he wants to begin his new fighting campaign, east of the Euphrates.
And if these reports are true, it sounds like a total US pullout of Syria would allow Turkey to have his way with these Kurds.
If we pull out and abandon these Kurds to Erdogan, who hates them and will kill them, how will we ever gain the trust of locals anywhere else to help us fight against terrorists?
UPDATE: Trump just tweeted that we have defeated ISIS in Syria…
We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2018