The Trump administration is initiating the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria in a dramatic reversal of existing Middle East policy.
President Trump has ordered a comprehensive and immediate withdrawal of the roughly 2,000 U.S. service members that remain in Syria after decimating the Islamic State’s territorial holdings, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. The State Department has also ordered the immediate evacuation of U.S. diplomats in Syria, Reuters reported just hours later.
Trump explained his rationale for the troop withdrawal in a tweet sent after the news broke.
"We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency," the president wrote.
The withdrawal comes just weeks after the U.S.-led coalition in Syria issued a statement categorically denying an imminent change to the status quo.
"Any reports indicating a change in the US position with respect" to the American presence in Syria "is false and designed to sow confusion and chaos," read the statement, issued earlier this month.
Trump spoke last week with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has in recent weeks increasingly voiced his displeasure with America’s ongoing partnership with the Kurdish forces in Northern Syria.
Erdogan, who has long considered the separatist Kurdish forces a terrorist group, has recently gone so far as to threaten an attack on the U.S.-backed forces.
Throughout his presidential campaign and since taking office, Trump has repeatedly promised to reduce the U.S. presence both in Afghanistan and in Syria — a course many experts have cautioned against due to the likelihood that ISIS and other terrorist groups will move to fill the power vacuum created by a rapid and full withdrawal of U.S. forces.
"The negative impact of this decision on America's credibility is hard to overstate," Jenny Cafarella, a Syria analyst at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, told the Journal.
"The SDF now has little choice but to seek an accommodation with the Assad regime or face possible defeat by Turkey. The SDF is so vulnerable without American assistance that Assad may not even think he needs to negotiate with them. He could decide instead to attack," Cafarella added, referring to the Syrian Democratic Forces, a coalition of rebel groups that has been engaged in heavy combat with pro-Assad forces since 2014.
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