On Friday, as Americans were heading home for the weekend, the Pentagon made a significant announcement: U.S. troops were in the process of withdrawing from Syria. Multiple U.S. outposts in the northeast of the war-torn country would be vacated, and U.S. service members would be consolidated into fewer bases. “This deliberate and conditions-based process will bring the U.S. footprint in Syria down to less than a thousand U.S. forces in the coming months,” the Pentagon press secretary said.
On the one hand, this drawdown is less momentous than it appears. During the tail end of President Joe Biden’s administration, the U.S. more than doubled its military presence in Syria to 2,000 troops, a precautionary measure of sorts after Islamist rebels led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) overthrew Bashar Assad’s regime after a weekslong offensive. President Donald Trump’s reduction brings the numbers down to where they were before that mini-surge took place.
Yet on the other hand, the redeployment suggests that Trump, who wanted to fully withdraw U.S. troops from Syria during his first term before he was talked out of it by his national security advisers, is at least flirting with executing a decision he should have made during his first term. If anything, the case for moving Syria into the rearview mirror is even stronger today than it was back then.
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