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Dec. 19, 2018 / 2:45 PM GMT
By Courtney Kube and Carol E. Lee
The U.S. is preparing to withdraw a significant number of troops from Syria, according to two senior defense officials and one person familiar with the plan.
The two senior defense officials said the White House would announce the move as early as Wednesday.
President Donald Trump, who has threatened in the past to pull out of Syria, did not declare a withdrawal on Wednesday but wrote on Twitter: “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.”
Trump’s plans to draw down U.S. troops in Syria appeared to take lawmakers and some senior administration officials by surprise, and the idea of a complete withdrawal swiftly met resistance in Congress.
“An American withdrawal at this time would be a big win for ISIS, Iran, Bashar al Assad of Syria, and Russia,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said in a statement. “I fear it will lead to devastating consequences for our nation, the region, and throughout the world.”
Graham called any plan for withdrawal in Syria “an Obama-like mistake” — a reference to President Barack Obama’s decision to completely withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011, only to redeploy American forces there several years later to combat ISIS.
Trump has repeatedly criticized Obama’s decision to withdraw from Iraq.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement that the U.S. has defeated ISIS’s “territorial caliphate,” but she did not say the administration is planning a complete withdrawal of American forces in Syria.
“These victories over ISIS in Syria do not signal the end of the Global Coalition or its campaign,” Sanders said. “We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign.”
Sanders did not elaborate on what that next phase will look like.
The U.S. military confirms having 503 U.S. troops in Syria, even though defense officials acknowledge having had more than 2,000 there at times. The military mission is to defeat ISIS, but troops have also been used more for stabilization efforts in recent weeks.
Senior administration officials have said for months that the U.S. would remain in Syria as long as Iran continues to have a presence there.
Earlier this month, defense secretary James Mattis announced the U.S. had set up observation posts near the Turkish border.
Two sources familiar with Trump’s plans in Syria said a troop drawdown is part of a deal the U.S. has cut with Turkey. Turkey’s foreign minister said in recent days that Trump had decided to withdraw from Syria.
Trump spoke with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and met with him in Argentina last month.
A Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) official, who spoke anonymously because the official is not authorized to speak publicly on the issue, said there are ongoing discussions between the SDF and U.S. military officials in Syria, but nothing has been finalized at this point and a time frame for any withdrawal remains unclear.
As far as the SDF are aware, there have been no movements of U.S. troops within Syria that would indicate a withdrawal is underway at the moment, the official said.
Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, said withdrawing from Syria would be an “extraordinarily short-sighted and naive” decision that would embolden the Assad regime and Iran while alienating the Kurdish forces who have fought with the U.S.
“It’s a sad state of affairs when our key allies on the ground, who’ve shed blood and thousands of lives for our fight against ISIS, are to be well and truly abandoned,” Lister said.
Even with a total withdrawal from Syria, the U.S. would still have a huge military presence in the Middle East with 5,200 troops across the border in Iraq.
At its height in 2014, ISIS established its “caliphate,” controlling huge swathes of Syria and Iraq. The hard-line group ran a de facto government out of the ancient Syrian city of Raqqa, overseeing as much as 39,000 square miles of land with 8 million people within that region.
U.S.-backed forces finally retook Raqqa last year, as well as Hajin, the last town held by ISIS in Syria, earlier this month.
The Pentagon did not formally announce the withdrawal on Wednesday. “At this time, we continue to work by, with and through our partners in the region,” said Col. Rob Manning, a Pentagon spokesman.
David K. Li and Ammar Cheikh Omar contributed.