From Newsgroup: soc.history.war.misc

Daniel DePetris: US should finally depart from Syria
A U.S. soldier patrols in Qamishli in northeast Syria on Jan. 9, 2025.
(Delil Souleiman/Getty-AFP)
A U.S. soldier patrols in Qamishli in northeast Syria on Jan. 9, 2025.
(Delil Souleiman/Getty-AFP)

By Daniel DePetris
PUBLISHED: April 22, 2025 at 5:00 AM CDT

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. rCLThis 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,rCY the Pentagon press secretary said.

On the one hand, this drawdown is less momentous than it appears. During
the tail end of President Joe BidenrCOs 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 AssadrCOs regime after a weekslong
offensive. President Donald TrumprCOs 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 rCo or at least complicating rCo Iranian weapons shipments to Hezbollah, IranrCOs proxy in Lebanon. Yet the downfall of the Assad regime, as well as the emergence of a new government in Damascus
keen to dilute TehranrCOs influence in the country, means that Washington doesnrCOt 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.

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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 WashingtonrCOs feet was dubious at best
and historically inaccurate at worst.

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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, RussiarCOs 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 canrCOt 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 WashingtonrCOs 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 rCo something that isnrCOt needed to protect
the United States and isnrCOt 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 couldnrCOt be further from the truth. The U.S. military might be the most capable
enemy Islamic State is confronting, but itrCOs 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.

TrumprCOs 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.

Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.

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