America Is Planning to Withdraw From Syria and Create a Disaster

https://foreignpolicy.com/america-is-planning-to-withdraw-from-s…

The Biden administration is reconsidering its military priorities in the middle east.

It should be cause for significant concern, however, that this could involve a full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria. While no definitive decision has been made to leave, four sources within the Defense and State departments said the White House is no longer invested in sustaining a mission that it perceives as unnecessary. Active internal discussions are now underway to determine how and when a withdrawal may take place.

The unprecedented international intervention launched in 2014 by the United States and more than 80 partner nations to defeat the terror group’s so-called territorial state was remarkably successful, with the final pocket of territory in Syria liberated in early 2019.

In Iraq, too, the Islamic State has almost vanished, degraded to such an extent that in 2023, it averaged just nine attacks a month—down from about 850 per month in 2014.

Some within the U.S. government are currently proposing a collaborative arrangement between the SDF and Syria’s regime to counter the Islamic State as an apparent path towards a U.S. withdrawal. That would not only be a phenomenal boon to the Islamic State, but simply impossible on its own terms. Part of the SDF may have periodic contact with Assad’s regime, but they are far from natural allies. The regime would never allow the SDF to sustain itself, and Turkey would do everything possible to kill what remained.

The last time that the Islamic State surged in Syria, in 2014, it transformed international security in profoundly negative ways. Should a U.S. withdrawal precipitate a return to Islamic State chaos, we will be relegated to mere observers, unable to return to a region that we will have placed squarely under the control of a pariah regime and its Russian and Iranian allies.