T. Belman. This article takes a more nuanced approach to the withdrawal decision. But it doesn’t say what if any agreements the US has with Turkey or Russia. Nor does it say why the US is in such a hurry. Furthermore, since he argued that it was time to bring the boys home, why is it more important to leave troops in Afghanistan then in Syria? Many unanswered questions.
The Pentagon to submit its plan to the White House by Wednesday to pull U.S. troops out of Syria
By Nancy A. Youssef and Alex Leary, WSJ
U.S. Army soldiers conduct surveillance during a patrol in Manbij, Syria, in November. Photo: Zoe Garbarino/U.S. Army/Associated Press
As military officials scrambled to produce an exit plan over Christmas, President Trump on Thursday defended his decision to order 2,000 U.S. service members to return home from Syria amid a growing schism between Washington and coalition partners who vowed to continue fighting the Islamic State extremist group.
“Getting out of Syria was no surprise,” Mr. Trump wrote. “I’ve been campaigning on it for years, and six months ago, when I very publicly wanted to do it, I agreed to stay longer.”
The withdrawal plan announced Wednesday drew criticism from within the White House, among both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill, the State Department and in the U.S. military. Many of them were concerned the move would embolden Iran’s presence in Syria and allow Islamic State to regroup.
France, a key U.S. ally in the Islamic State fight, said Thursday it will keep hundreds of ground troops inside Syria. French and U.K. officials, along with Kurdish members of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, said they don’t believe the extremist group has been defeated.
“Islamic State has not been wiped from the map nor have its roots. The last pockets of this terrorist organization must be defeated militarily once and for all,” French Defense Minister Florence Parly said Thursday on Twitter. Representatives of the U.S.-backed local forces, the Syrian Democratic Forces, are expected to travel to France on Friday to discuss the way ahead.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday vowed to increase his country’s efforts to stem Iranian military entrenchment in Syria.
“We will continue to act very aggressively against Iranian attempts to entrench in Syria…We do not intend to reduce our efforts. We will strengthen them, and I know that we do so with the full support and backing of the United States,” he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that Moscow supported the U.S. decision to withdraw, but he questioned whether Washington would pull out entirely. “I don’t see signs they are leaving,” he said at his year-end news conference in Moscow.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, said Thursday it was still ironing out the specifics of its withdrawal plan. Among the unresolved issues: How much U.S. military equipment will be left behind in Syria; whether the American military will continue to conduct airstrikes after troops depart; whether the U.S. could continue supporting its longtime partners, the SDF, even while not working alongside them.
The Pentagon said U.S. airstrikes against suspected Islamic State targets would continue in Syria for three more months or longer. And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested the U.S. war against extremist groups wouldn’t end with the troop withdrawal.
“Your listeners should be assured that the United States of America intends to continue that counterterrorism campaign, continue the fight against ISIS, whether it stems from Syria or other places,” Mr. Pompeo said in an interview on the Laura Ingraham radio program.
Military officials have said the withdrawal timeline could be a short as one month. In that event, much of the U.S. military equipment now in Syria would be destroyed in country or handed over to Kurdish and other local partners, officials said. If the U.S. military has three months to wind down its presence there, much of that equipment could come out, two defense officials said.
“We are proposing the long plan,” one defense official said. “There’s certainly stuff there we were never planning to give over that we would like to now take out.”
Up until Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria as quickly as possible, military planners had assumed the U.S. exit from Syria would be slow and would take place in the coming months, if not years.
With the president’s announcement, military planners scrambled to craft a plan under the new presidential directive, officials said.
The withdrawal order has come under bipartisan criticism and shaken parts of the Pentagon, where some fear long-term effects from abandoning the Kurds, its most effective local partners.
“It literally came out of left field,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) said Thursday. “It rattled the world.”
Mr. Trump responded to the criticism from Mr. Graham, who recently has been a supporter of the administration, in a Twitter message.
“So hard to believe that Lindsey Graham would be against saving soldier lives & billions of $$$,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Why are we fighting for our enemy, Syria, by staying & killing ISIS for them, Russia, Iran & other locals? Time to focus on our Country & bring our youth back home where they belong!”
U.S. troops are deployed mainly in northeastern Syria, as part of the fight against Islamic State, as well as near the city of al-Tanf, close to where Iranian-backed forces also operated, between the Iraqi and Israeli borders.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a U.S.-based, pro-Israel organization that has backed many of Mr. Trump’s policies, said the U.S. withdrawal from Syria must be accompanied by plans to restrain Iran-backed groups in the country.
“The administration should work with our regional allies and take steps to counter the mounting aggression of Iran and its terrorist proxy Hezbollah,” AIPAC said in a statement.
—Gordon Lubold in Washington, Anatoly Kurmanaev in Moscow and Dov Lieber in Tel Aviv contributed to this article.
@ Ted Belman:
Agreed. The reason for the troops to originally go there s not really valid today. They could be there for ever. And I know for certain, from reading a variety of history texts that the normal condition in Afghanistan is some sort of war. They are capable of being at war for 100 years. because of their tenacious belief and the precipitous terrain that only they can range through at will…I don’t think that they ever really were conquered. When the British were there in the 19th cent. they never really won that war. It was a lifelong occupation.
@ Edgar G.:
But he is leaving half of the 14,000 US troops in Afghanistan and none in Syria. My point is that I see no value in staying in Afghanistan and some value in staying in Syria.
Concerning Ted’s comments at top….I read, the day before yesterday, that Trump also intended to bring home 50% of the troops in Afghanistan….