President Trump is planning to withdraw thousands of US troops from Syria, Turkey’s Anadolu Agency reported on Tuesday, citing the Israeli broadcaster Kan.
The Kan report said that “senior White House officials conveyed a message to their Israeli counterparts indicating that President Trump intends to pull thousands of US troops from Syria.”
The report added that a US troop withdrawal from Syria would “raise significant concerns in Tel Aviv.”
Before Trump was inaugurated, the Pentagon under the Biden administration admitted that it had been lying about the number of troops it had in Syria. For years, the Pentagon said there were 900 US troops occupying eastern Syria, but it revealed in December that 2,000 troops are stationed there.
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.
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.
In a sign that a withdrawal could happen under the second Trump administration, the president appointed a critic of the US presence in Syria and Iraq as the Pentagon’s Middle East policy chief. Mike Dimino, a former CIA analyst, has called for US troops to be pulled out of the two countries, citing their vulnerability to attacks.
While Trump’s main justification for staying in Syria in 2019 was to “keep the oil,” he also said Israel and Jordan didn’t want to see a US withdrawal. “The other region where we’ve been asked by Israel and Jordan to leave a small number of troops is a totally different section of Syria, near Jordan, and close to Israel,” Trump said in October 2019. “So we have a small group there, and we secured the oil. Other than that, there’s no reason for it, in our opinion.”
