The Pentagon is drafting plans to withdraw all US troops from Syria after President Trump and officials close to him expressed interest in the idea, NBC News reported on Wednesday.
Israeli media recently reported that the US informed Israel it planned to pull out of Syria. Trump denied the report but added that Syria has “got its own mess” and doesn’t need the US “involved.”
The NBC report said Pentagon officials have drawn up plans to pull all US troops out of Syria within 30, 60, or 90 days. The US currently has about 2,000 troops occupying eastern Syria, where it backs the Kurdish-led SDF, which has been fighting fierce battles with Turkish-backed factions in northern Syria.
The idea of pulling out of Syria aligns with the view of Mike Dimino, a former CIA analyst who is now the Pentagon’s Middle East policy chief. Before taking the post, Dimino worked for Defense Priorities, a think tank that advocates for a more restrained, less interventionist foreign policy. In that role, Dimino argued US troops should be pulled out of Syria, citing their vulnerability to attack.
While on paper, the US says it’s in Syria to fight ISIS remnants, the real purpose of the occupation was to keep Iran out of eastern Syria and put pressure on the former Assad government with the ultimate goal of regime change, which happened in December when the al-Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham took power in Damascus.
During his first term in office, Trump said he would withdraw from Syria but ended up reversing his decision after coming under immense pressure from Congress and elements of his administration. Trump may face less pressure this time around since Iran’s ally is no longer in power.
In 2019, Trump agreed to keep only several hundred US troops in Syria to “secure” oil fields, but his envoy for Syria at the time, James Jeffrey, later admitted he was lying about the real number of US troops in the country.
“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey told Defense One when he was on his way out of the Trump administration in 2020. He said the real number of US troops in Syria was “a lot more than” the roughly 200 troops Trump agreed to leave in 2019.
Jeffrey also discussed how he worked to convince Trump not to withdraw from Syria. “When the situation in northeast Syria had been fairly stable after we defeated ISIS, [Trump] was inclined to pull out. In each case, we then decided to come up with five better arguments for why we needed to stay. And we succeeded both times. That’s the story,” he said.
