There are roughly 4,500 U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria today, and they represent a potentially significant strategic vulnerability to our country.
U.S. service members have been stationed in Syria since early 2016, with troops kept in the country by both President-elect Donald Trump during his first term and now by President Joe Biden under the mission of fighting the Islamic State terrorist group during the Syrian civil war. But now that the Assad regime has fallen, our troops should be fully withdrawn.
Biden once said he would never “ask our troops to fight on endlessly in another—in another country’s civil war.” He should match action to those words and immediately end this pointless deployment in Iraq and Syria, before his term ends on Jan. 20.
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, however, is making the case not only that those troops have value to the United States but that their presence should endure even after the arrival of Trump. At the Ronald Reagan Defense Forum earlier this month, Sullivan claimed that our troops in Syria are “there to work hand in hand with local partners, to continue to suppress the threat that ISIS [Islamic State group] has posed, going back many years now.”
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