On Friday, as Americans were heading home for the weekend, the Pentagon made a significant announcement: U.S. troops were in the process of withdrawing from Syria. Multiple U.S. outposts in the northeast of the war-torn country would be vacated, and U.S. service members would be consolidated into fewer bases. “This deliberate and conditions-based process will bring the U.S. footprint in Syria down to less than a thousand U.S. forces in the coming months,” the Pentagon press secretary said.
On the one hand, this drawdown is less momentous than it appears. During the tail end of President Joe Biden’s administration, the U.S. more than doubled its military presence in Syria to 2,000 troops, a precautionary measure of sorts after Islamist rebels led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) overthrew Bashar Assad’s regime after a weekslong offensive. President Donald Trump’s reduction brings the numbers down to where they were before that mini-surge took place.
Yet on the other hand, the redeployment suggests that Trump, who wanted to fully withdraw U.S. troops from Syria during his first term before he was talked out of it by his national security advisers, is at least flirting with executing a decision he should have made during his first term. If anything, the case for moving Syria into the rearview mirror is even stronger today than it was back then.
Every major justification given to keep U.S. forces in place is now irrelevant. U.S. officials frequently argued that maintaining U.S. bases along critical transport corridors at the Iraq-Syria border was instrumental in stopping — or at least complicating — Iranian weapons shipments to Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon. Yet the downfall of the Assad regime, as well as the emergence of a new government in Damascus keen to dilute Tehran’s influence in the country, means that Washington doesn’t really have to worry about this problem anymore. And to be honest, it was puzzling why U.S. officials worried about it anyway; Israel has proved to be remarkably proficient at finding and destroying many of these weapons shipments before they have reached Lebanon. In any event, Iranian power in Syria is now at a low point.
Russia, of course, was cited as another reason to continue the status quo. If the U.S. departed, the argument went, the Russians would fill whatever vacuum was left, thus expanding its influence over a critical region and making Washington look feckless in the process.
But this was always a strange claim. First, Moscow had a long-standing relationship with Syria since the early days of the Cold War, when it viewed the Arab country as a Soviet proxy, so the notion that Russia was somehow stealing Syria underneath Washington’s feet was dubious at best and historically inaccurate at worst.
Second, Russia always had an interest in ensuring that a reliable government was in place in Damascus, in large part because the Russians had a warm-water port in the country it desperately wanted to preserve. Finally, the notion that Syria was a prize for the Russians was belied by the fact that Moscow had to bail out Assad time and again over the last decade, first with weapons supplies and then with a large-scale, multiyear bombing campaign. Despite all of this, Russia’s work came to naught in December, when it had to airlift Assad and his family to Moscow as his regime was crumbling. Like Iran, Russia is essentially begging the HTS-led government to turn the page.
Of course, we can’t talk about the U.S. troop presence in Syria without talking about the Islamic State. After all, it was this terrorist group that drew the U.S. military there in the first place. The U.S.-led bombing campaign against the Islamic State began in 2014, and the following year, U.S. special operations forces filtered into the country to coordinate with anti-Islamic State militias that had an even greater interest in seeing the militant group vanquished than the United States did. The partnership was ultimately successful; in March 2019, the Islamic State lost the last strip of territory it controlled in Syria, and the territorial caliphate that once stretched from Raqqa in north-central Syria to the gates of Baghdad has been in the dustbin of history since.
Even so, U.S. national security officials have repeatedly made the case that departing Syria would compromise all this hard-earned progress and jeopardize Washington’s goal of eliminating Islamic State in its entirety. Yet there are three big issues with this line of thinking. One, this basically means U.S. troops are destined to stay in Syria forever. Two, it suggests that U.S. counterterrorism operators have the ability to kill every single lunatic and unhinged loner who considers himself a member of the group — something that isn’t needed to protect the United States and isn’t possible anyway.
Perhaps most importantly, it assumes that Islamic State will simply pick up where it left off, as if withdrawing U.S. troops will somehow pave the way for an Islamic State-led rampage across Syria. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The U.S. military might be the most capable enemy Islamic State is confronting, but it’s hardly the only one. Due to its past depravities and crimes against humanity, Islamic State created multiple enemies for itself, including the Syrian Kurds, Russia, Jordan, the Gulf Arab powers and even the new Syrian government, which views the terrorist group as a principal threat to its own rule.
These actors will still be fighting Islamic State when U.S. troops leave. In fact, with the United States out of the picture, they might even take more initiative in doing so.
Trump’s order to withdraw some U.S. forces is a welcome development. He should go much further by going down to zero.
Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
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