WASHINGTON — The Trump White House is weighing plans to withdraw the majority of its troops from Syria over next few months, Al-Monitor has learned.
Under the Pentagon’s plan — which has not yet received final approval by the White House’s National Security Council — Syria’s Kurdish-led militias would retain control of more than a dozen makeshift prisons holding thousands of Islamic State detainees and their families across the country’s northeast.
Fewer than half of the estimated 2,000 American troops currently in Syria would remain in the country in order to sustain at least some level of oversight of the prisons in coordination with Kurdish forces, Al-Monitor’s sources said.
The Pentagon has not publicly confirmed the plans. “The Department of Defense routinely reallocates forces based on operational needs and contingencies,” a defense official told Al-Monitor in a written statement.
“These movements demonstrate the flexible nature of US global defense posture and US capability to deploy worldwide on short notice to meet evolving security threats.”
The White House’s National Security Council did not immediately respond to Al-Monitor’s request for comment.
Why it matters: The interagency considerations come on the heels of a unity agreement between Syria’s US-backed Kurdish-led militias and former HTS leaders in Damascus last month.
The Bashar al-Assad regime collapsed on Dec. 8 in the face of an HTS-led rebel offensive, ending six decades of despotic rule. But Syria’s Kurds have yet to achieve written guarantees of political autonomy. Kurds were denied basic rights as citizens for decades under Assad family rule.
Backed by US special operations forces and air power, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) destroyed the Islamic State’s self-described caliphate between 2015 and 2019. A significant contingent of American-led coalition troops has remained in liberated enclaves of eastern Syria in order to prevent ISIS’ return.
American officials across three presidential administrations have repeatedly said that US troops remain present there only in order to fight ISIS, not as a guarantor of the political aspirations of the SDF’s ruling affiliates in northeast.
Behind the scenes: US, French and Iraqi Kurdish diplomats have been urging the SDF’s political affiliate, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which dominates northeast Syria, to reconcile with its rivals in the opposition Kurdish National Council (KNC) bloc.
The fragile alignment of Syrian Kurdish political affiliates plans to put forth a platform demanding autonomy for northeast Syria from Damascus during a national dialogue conference scheduled to be held in Qamishli at the end of April, Al-Monitor reported earlier this week.
The SDF’s political arm has criticized Syria’s new interim constitution, which centralizes power in the presidency, but the Kurdish-led militia alliance has agreed in principle to eventually join a future unified Syrian military. US military officials privately urged SDF leadership to reach the recent unity deal with Damascus’ forces.
Flashback: During his previous term as president, Trump ordered a precipitous withdrawal of all US troops from Syria in December 2018, and then again in October 2019. The first withdrawal order was never put into action because of persuading by top advisers and cabinet members led by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
The second withdrawal was halted amid backlash from key Trump allies in Congress, but not before Sunni Arab opposition militias backed by Turkey committed atrocities in SDF-held areas as US troops ceded ground. Israeli and Jordanian leaders lobbied Washington against the move due to concerns about instability near their borders.
What’s next: Iran’s IRGC forces withdrew from Syria following the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus in December, removing a primary — if unspoken — justification for the Pentagon’s continued troop presence in Syria.
The big unknown remains Turkey’s government, which considers the core leadership of the SDF to be inextricable from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a left-wing militant group that has fought an intermittent insurgency against the Turkish government since 1984. Turkey considers the PKK to be a terrorist organization, rendering the US’ partnership with its Syrian offshoot a persistent irritant in ties between the two NATO allies.
In February, the PKK declared a ceasefire after its imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, called on the faction to lay down its arms and put an end to armed resistance. Turkey’s defense minister, Yasar Guler, has denied the peace talks hold bearing on Ankara’s disposition toward northeast Syria. Turkey has launched three military incursions against the SDF over the past decade.
A spokesperson for Turkey’s embassy in Washington did not respond to Al-Monitor’s request for comment by publication time.
More than 9,000 ISIS military-age males and at least some 42,600 of their suspected family members remain detained in makeshift prisons guarded by the SDF across northeast Syria. Some 2,000 foreign fighters remain in the prisons, according to a Pentagon watchdog report released in February.
Know more: “Our wish is for US forces to stay even if in smaller numbers,” SDF top commander Mazlum Kobani told Al-Monitor’s Amberin Zaman last week in an exclusive interview from an undisclosed location in northeast Syria.
US officials are weighing whether to maintain troops at the remote Al-Tanf garrison in southeast Syria, along the country’s desert border with Iraq and Jordan, a key gateway for drug smuggling and Iran-backed militias that once bolstered the Assad regime.
The expected longer-term presence of a smaller US troop contingent in Syria remains tied to the presence of American forces in neighboring Iraq. The current understanding between Washington and Baghdad remains in effect, Al-Monitor’s sources said.
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