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What Was the Point of the Syria ‘Withdrawal’?
Donald Trump, who vowed to get troops out of Syria altogether, incurred all the strategic costs without getting any of the political benefit.
And as is becoming better known at this time, the Kurds played a major role in the al-Baghdadi operation. Detaining a female and messenger with intimate knowledge of al-Baghdadi, interrogating these suspects which opened the door to other high value individuals, positively identifying al-Baghdadi through DNA samples, and maintaining a 24/7 eyes-on operation of the compound al-Baghdadi was hiding out in near Barisha, Syria. It is a testament to the integrity and honor of these people that they continued to assist the US after being betrayed by Donald Trump.
Donald Trump, who vowed to get troops out of Syria altogether, incurred all the strategic costs without getting any of the political benefit.
No sooner had the president taken a Twitter victory lap for “BRINGING OUR SOLDIERS BACK HOME” from Syria than his secretary of defense offered a slight caveat. Actually, Mark Esper said in a speech today, an unspecified number would stay put—to guard the oil. Weeks of sudden decisions and switchbacks in U.S. Syria policy had come to this: A small number of American troops in Syria had … moved. Donald Trump, who had vowed to get them out of the immediate area of a coming Turkish assault in northeastern Syria, had incurred all the strategic costs of announcing a withdrawal without getting any of the political benefit of actually following all the way through. What was the point? The strategic costs were these: a Turkish assault on the United States’ Kurdish partners in the counter-ISIS fight; an unknown number of ISIS prisoners—perhaps 100, Esper told CNN—escaped from prison in the chaos before officials claimed that they’d been recaptured; a reordered map of northern Syria taking shape, with Russia and Turkey as key power brokers filling the vacuum; and a Kurdish partnership with the regime of Bashar al-Assad, who has used chemical weapons and indiscriminate bombings of civilians in a bid to keep power over the course of an eight-year civil war.
There was also the small matter that the U.S. had actually sent an additional 14,000 troops to the region since May, generally in an effort, officials said, to deter the Iranian regime from attacking U.S. interests there. As part of this, Trump—who campaigned on getting the United States out of the Middle East altogether and said the U.S. should never have been there to begin with—oversaw the first deployment of American troops to Saudi Arabia since 2003. It turned out that Syria would actually be no exception. Esper confirmed today that the U.S. would be leaving troops in the eastern oil-producing region of Deir ez-Zur, where the Islamic State once held territory and where the U.S. now has a base. At a press conference with the Syrian Kurdish leader Ilham Ahmed this week, after Trump floated the idea of protecting Syrian oil fields but before he announced that some troops would stay, the Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal seemed offended by the very idea: “Talk about the oil fields is a cruel distraction … The amount of revenue from the oil fields is basically a rounding error in the United States military budget.” The Syrian Democratic Forces, for now, has vowed to continue its coordination with the United States, including guarding ISIS prisoners. By the end of the week, U.S. policy in Syria wasn’t at all clear, but the message of the week’s drama was. In Syria, the president wants to protect oil—not people.
And as is becoming better known at this time, the Kurds played a major role in the al-Baghdadi operation. Detaining a female and messenger with intimate knowledge of al-Baghdadi, interrogating these suspects which opened the door to other high value individuals, positively identifying al-Baghdadi through DNA samples, and maintaining a 24/7 eyes-on operation of the compound al-Baghdadi was hiding out in near Barisha, Syria. It is a testament to the integrity and honor of these people that they continued to assist the US after being betrayed by Donald Trump.