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Officials Say Trump Has Ordered Full Withdrawal of U.S. Troops From Syria Trump Withdraws U.S. Forces From Syria, Declaring Victory Against ISIS
(35 minutes later)
WASHINGTON — President Trump has ordered a rapid withdrawal of all 2,000 United States ground troops from Syria within 30 days, declaring the four-year American-led war against the Islamic State as largely won, officials said Wednesday. WASHINGTON — President Trump has ordered the withdrawal of 2,000 American troops from Syria, bringing a sudden end to a military campaign that largely vanquished the Islamic State but ceding a strategically vital country to Russia and Iran.
“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” the president said in a Twitter post on Wednesday morning. He offered no details on his plans for the military mission, nor a larger strategy, in Syria. In overruling his generals and civilian advisers, Mr. Trump fulfilled his frequently expressed desire to bring home American forces from a messy foreign entanglement. But his decision, conveyed via Twitter on Wednesday, plunges the administration’s Middle East strategy into disarray, rattling allies like Britain and Israel and forsaking Syria’s ethnic Kurds, who have been faithful partners in fighting the Islamic State.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement that “we have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign.” The abrupt, chaotic nature of the move — and the opposition it immediately provoked on Capitol Hill and beyond — raised questions about how Mr. Trump will follow through with the full withdrawal. Even after the president’s announcement, officials said, the Pentagon and State Department continued to try to talk him out of it.
But Pentagon officials who had sought to talk the president out of the decision as late as Wednesday morning argued that such a move would betray Kurdish allies who have fought alongside American troops in Syria and who could find themselves under attack in a military offensive now threatened by Turkey. “Our boys, our young women, our men — they’re all coming back, and they’re coming back now,” Mr. Trump declared in a video posted Wednesday evening on Twitter.
One American official said that Kurdish leaders were informed of the president’s decision on Wednesday morning. “We won, and that’s the way we want it, and that’s the way they want it,” he said, pointing a finger skyward, referring to American troops who had been killed in battle.
”At this time, we continue to work by, with and through our partners in the region,” Col. Rob Manning, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a short statement. The White House did not provide a timetable or other specifics for the military departure. “We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. Defense Department officials said that Mr. Trump had ordered that the withdrawal be completed in 30 days.
A second official said the withdrawal of troops would be phased out over several weeks and that the American-led airstrike campaign against the Islamic State in Syria, which began in 2014, would continue. That official said the military hoped to rely on Kurdish fighters on the ground to help with targeting. The decision brought a storm of protest in Congress, even from Republican allies of Mr. Trump’s like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who said he had been “blindsided.” The House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, suggested that the president had acted out of “personal or political objectives” rather than national security interests.
Officials discussed the emerging policy on condition of anonymity before any announcement from the White House. Like many of Mr. Trump’s most disruptive moves, the decision was jolting and yet predictable. For more than a year, and particularly since the Islamic State has been driven from most of its territory in Syria’s north, he has told advisers that he wanted to withdraw troops from the country.
Emerging from a Senate conference lunch with Vice President Mike Pence and other Republican senators, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina attacked the decision to withdraw troops from Syria. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other top national security officials argued that a withdrawal would, essentially, surrender Western influence in Syria to Russia and Iran. The Trump administration’s national security policy calls for challenging both countries, which are the chief benefactors of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and have provided him with years of financial and military support.
“A lot of us were blindsided,” Mr. Graham said, likening the withdrawal to “Iraq all over again” — a reference to the Obama administration’s decision to end the military mission in Iraq in 2011. The departure of American troops there allowed the deadly strengthening and spread of the Islamic State. Abandoning the Kurdish allies, the officials argued, also would cripple future American efforts to gain the trust of local fighters for counterterrorism operations, including in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia.
“If Obama had done this, all of us would be furious,” Mr. Graham said. “If Obama had done this, we’d be going nuts right now: ‘How weak, how dangerous.’” He said he wanted Congress to hold hearings about the consequences of the decision, and asked why lawmakers were not notified of Mr. Trump’s order. The Russian Foreign Ministry welcomed the move, according to the TASS news agency, saying that a withdrawal created prospects for a political settlement in Syria’s civil war. It also said an initiative to form a Syrian constitutional committee would have a bright future once American troops were gone.
In a series of meetings and conference calls over the past several days, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other senior national security officials have tried to dissuade Mr. Trump from a wholesale troop withdrawal, arguing that the significant national security policy shift would essentially cede foreign influence in Syria to Russia and Iran at a time when American policy calls for challenging both countries. While Mr. Trump has long cast American military involvement in Syria as narrowly focused on defeating the Islamic State, his generals and diplomats argue that the United States has broader, more complex interests there.
Abandoning the American-backed Kurdish allies, Pentagon officials have argued, will hamper future efforts by the United States to gain the trust of local fighters, from Afghanistan to Yemen to Somalia. Gen. Joseph Votel, the commander of United States Central Command, and Brett H. McGurk, the American envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State, fiercely protested the military withdrawal, administration officials said. Both argued that the Islamic State would never have been defeated without the Kurdish fighters, whom General Votel said suffered many casualties and always lived up to their word.
In addition, the Islamic State has not been fully vanquished from the small territory it controls on the Syrian-Iraqi border. The Islamic State has held that territory for more than a year in the face of attacks by American-allied forces, and has used it as a launching pad to carry out attacks in Iraq and Syria. Officials said General Votel argued that withdrawing American troops would leave the Kurds vulnerable to attack from Turkey, which has warned it will soon launch an offensive against them. It would also cement the survival of Mr. Assad, whose ouster had long been an article of faith in Washington.
Less than a week ago, Brett H. McGurk, the United States envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State, said continuing to train Syrian security forces as American troops are doing, “will take some time.” The Pentagon said in a statement that it would “continue working with our partners and allies to defeat” the Islamic State wherever it operated.
“The military mission is the enduring defeat of ISIS,” Mr. McGurk told reporters on Dec. 11. “We have obviously learned a lot of lessons in the past, so we know that once the physical space is defeated, we can’t just pick up and leave. So we’re prepared to make sure that we do all we can to ensure this is enduring.” Mr. Trump’s decision contradicted what other top national security officials have said in recent weeks.
“Nobody is declaring a mission accomplished,” he said. Two months ago, the national security adviser, John R. Bolton, said the United States would not pull out of Syria as long as Iran was exerting influence there, either through its own troops or Iranian-backed militias.
But Mr. Trump promised during his presidential campaign to withdraw American troops from Syria, and has been looking for a way out since. He reluctantly agreed in April to give the Defense Department more time to finish the mission. Last week, Mr. McGurk characterized the mission in Syria as one that sought the “enduring defeat” of the Islamic State. “We know that once the physical space is defeated, we can’t just pick up and leave,” he told reporters. “We want to stay on the ground and make sure that stability can be maintained in these areas.”
In recent days, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has given Mr. Trump just such a possible path: Mr. Erdogan has vowed to launch a new offensive against the Kurdish troops that the United States has equipped to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Military commanders fear that a hasty withdrawal will jeopardize the territorial gains against the Islamic State made by the United States and its coalition partners — essentially repeating what happened after Mr. Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama, pulled troops from Iraq in 2011.
As the debate over withdrawing from Syria was raging inside the White House over recent days, Mr. Trump argued that the risk of a Turkish incursion could be a threat to the United States forces in Syria, officials said, although Mr. Erdogan would likely face huge reprisals if Turkish troops killed or wounded any Americans. Mr. Graham, emerging from a lunch with Vice President Mike Pence and other Republican senators, called it “Iraq all over again.” He demanded to know why Congress was not notified of Mr. Trump’s decision.
On Monday, Mr. Erdogan said that he told Mr. Trump that Turkey would launch its offensive soon. “If Obama had done this,” Mr. Graham said, “we’d be going nuts right now: how weak, how dangerous.”
Turkey considers the American-backed Kurdish forces to be a terrorist group because of their connection to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a Kurdish insurgency in the region. The Syrian Kurds hope to create an autonomous region in northeast Syria, similar to the one in neighboring Iraq. They now control around 30 percent of Syria’s territory. During the meeting, officials said Mr. Pence barely talked about the looming government shutdown, which he was ostensibly on Capitol Hill to discuss, because there was such strong pushback from lawmakers on Syria.
Pentagon officials have been pushing for a diplomatic solution to the issue. American allies were notedly muted in their reactions. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel called it “of course, an American decision,” and said his government would study its implications. But analysts said the withdrawal would deal a blow to Israel’s efforts to curb Iranian influence in Syria.
The Islamic State, a militant group also known as ISIS, has lost nearly all of its territory in Iraq and Syria, where the 2,000 American troops are mostly advising a militia made up of Kurdish and Arab soldiers. “It’s a bad day for Israel,” said Ehud Yaari, an Israel-based fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
In recent days, Turkey has accused the United States of failing to tackle security threats in the region. The United States and Turkey are NATO allies but uneasy partners in the war against the Islamic State. A statement released by the British government said that while the global coalition against the Islamic State had made progress, “we must not lose sight of the threat they pose.”
But one Defense Department official suggested that Mr. Trump also wants to divert attention away from the series of legal challenges confronting him over the recent days: the Russian investigation run by the special counsel as well as the sentencing of his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, in a hush-money scandal to buy the silence of two women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump. “Even without territory,” the statement said, the group “will remain a threat.”
Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, was in court on Tuesday, where he was harshly criticized by federal judge for his efforts to mislead federal investigators. For much of the day, the White House seemed paralyzed by Mr. Trump’s sudden move. By late Wednesday, it had yet to defend the consequences of the troop withdrawal, or explain what the American strategy in Syria will be once the American forces have left.
In a conference call with reporters, a senior White House official said that previous statements by Mr. Bolton and other senior officials that the United States would stay in Syria did not matter because, as president, Mr. Trump could do as he pleases.
“He gets to do that,” said the official, whom the White House said could speak only on grounds of anonymity. “That’s his prerogative.”
The official referred all questions about how the withdrawal would proceed to the Pentagon. At the Pentagon, reporters asked officials for clarification, only to be told that there was none that could be given.
It was very much the image of a story spinning out of control, and a military taken by surprise by its commander in chief.
One Defense Department official suggested that Mr. Trump wanted to divert attention from his mounting legal troubles: the Russia investigation; the sentencing of his former personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, in a hush money scandal to buy the silence of two women who said they had affairs with him; and his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, who was harshly criticized by a federal judge for lying to investigators.
In a statement, Ms. Pelosi derided what she described as a “hasty announcement” and noted it was timed to the day after Mr. Flynn was in court for sentencing after admitting “he was a registered foreign agent for a country with clear interests in the Syrian conflict.”
She was referring to Mr. Flynn’s lobbying efforts to expel a Turkish cleric living in Pennsylvania whom President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has accused of plotting a failed 2016 coup.
“All Americans should be concerned,” Ms. Pelosi said.
Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee and the outgoing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said after a visit to the White House, where his farewell meeting with Mr. Trump was canceled, that he did not believe there was a way to persuade the president to reverse the withdrawal order.
“It’s obviously a political decision,” Mr. Corker said.
Not everybody faulted the president’s move.
Robert S. Ford, the last American ambassador to Syria, said the United States could continue to strike terrorist targets from the air. The limited nature of the American ground presence, he said, would not force Iran out of the country, nor would it alter the battle between Mr. Assad and the remnants of the rebellion.
“The whole Syrian conflict is about Syrians’ relations with other Syrians,” said Mr. Ford, who now teaches at Yale and is a fellow at the Middle East Institute. “Two thousand special operators and a dozen or two American diplomats can’t fix that.”