A US War Department official said on Monday that the Pentagon has no planned “force posture changes” regarding the US military presence in Syria following a deadly attack in the country over the weekend that killed three Americans, including two members of the Iowa National Guard and a civilian interpreter.
“Currently, we have no force posture changes to announce,” a War Department official told Antiwar.com when asked if the Trump administration was planning to withdraw from Syria.
The US withdrew a few hundred soldiers from Syria earlier this year, but the comment signals a full withdrawal isn’t on the table. There are currently around 1,000 US troops in the country, a Pentagon official told The New York Times.
Also on Monday, the US Army identified the two members of the Iowa National Guard who were killed: Sgt. Edgar Brian Torres-Tovar, 25, of Des Moines, Iowa, and Sgt. William Nathaniel Howard, 29, of Marshalltown, Iowa.
The attack on Saturday was carried out by a member of the Syrian government’s own security forces, something that’s been confirmed by the Interior Ministry, but President Trump has blamed the incident on ISIS.
“We had three great patriots terminated by bad people. It was not the Syrian government, it was ISIS. The Syrian government fought by our side,” President Trump said on Sunday.
Trump has embraced the new Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, despite his al-Qaeda past, and recently hosted him in the Oval Office. Sharaa’s government has officially joined the US-led anti-ISIS coalition even though Sharaa himself was once an ally of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder of ISIS.
According to reports from Syria, the attacker who killed three Americans has been identified as Tariq Satouf al-Hamd, who was previously a member of ISIS but joined the government’s security forces after the fall of former President Bashar al-Assad. Wael Essam, a Palestinian journalist who covers the conflict in Syria, said there are likely “hundreds like him” within Syria’s security forces.
The Syrian government is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an al-Qaeda offshoot with an ideology similar to ISIS, meaning there is fluidity between members of the two groups. Sharaa could face a rebellion from the more ideological members of his security forces, who are unhappy with his ties with the US and deference toward Israel, and US troops operating alongside Syrian forces could face more insider attacks.
After the attack on Saturday, the Syrian government announced that it would step up its operations against ISIS. On Sunday evening, ISIS launched an attack on Syrian forces in the northwestern Idlib province, killing four.
“The soldiers of the caliphate attacked a patrol of the apostate Syrian government on the Maarat al-Naaman road yesterday with machine gun weapons, which led to the killing of four and the wounding of one and the destruction of their vehicle,” ISIS said in a statement, according to The Cradle.
