In December 2018, to the shock of pretty much everybody in the U.S. national security establishment at the time, President Donald Trump publicly ordered the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Syria. The announcement caused a panic within the Defense Department, State Department and National Security Council, whose officials teamed up to dissuade Trump from going through with it. A similar story unfolded ten months later, in October 2019. Again, the bureaucracy pushed back; in October 2019, the House went so far as to pass a resolution opposing a U.S. withdrawal, with senior Republican lawmakers signing onto the measure.
Fast-forward more than six years later, and the U.S. troop withdrawal Trump floated about during his first term is finally coming to fruition in his second. On Thursday, February 12, U.S. Central Command issued a statement that the U.S. military “completed the orderly departure of U.S. forces from al-Tanf Garrison in Syria… as part of a deliberate and conditions-based transition” of the counter-ISIS mission. The news came days after U.S. troops and equipment reportedly left the al-Shaddadi base in northeastern Syria, likely for next-door Iraq.
Today’s departure from the al-Tanf garrison in eastern Syria is especially noteworthy. Al-Tanf, located at the cross-section between Iraq, Syria and Jordan, was used by the U.S.-led coalition as a key staging ground for the training of anti-ISIS fighters. It quickly grew to become a de-facto U.S. partition of Syrian territory, complete with a 55-kilometer no-fly and no-drive zone around the base. Any hostile force encroaching into the zone was at high risk of getting neutralized by U.S. air power. During several instances in 2017, militias supporting former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad tested the zone by flying drones and sending military vehicles into U.S.-enforced deconfliction bubble. The drones were shot down, the vehicles were destroyed and the personnel manning them were killed.
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