[ 📸 U.S. troops go on patrol at al-Tanf air base in eastern Syria. The Syrian government considers the United States presence in its eastern third as an illegal occupation, and wants U.S. soldiers out of the country.]
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US TO CONSIDER WITHDRAWAL FROM SYRIAN OCCUPATION
The United States is considering a withdrawal of its forces from Syria, according to an article published in Foreign Policy, an online news periodical with ties to the U.S. Defense establishment.
Citing four sources from within the U.S. departments of State and Defense, Foreign Policy claims active internal discussions are ongoing within the Biden administration on a troop withdrawal from Syria, a notoriously illegal occupation of nearly one-third of Syrian territory, which the United States has used to siphon tens of billions of dollars worth of oil out of the country.
The piece was written by senior fellow and director of the Syrian Counterterrorism and Extremism Programs at Middle East Institute, Charles Lister.
The organization itself, the Middle East Institute, is funded by a who's-who of U.S. proxy-governments, Intelligence sources, elite Universities, and giant corporations including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman, ExxonMobil, George Soros's Open Societies Foundation, Morgan Stanley, and Princeton University.
The article itself presents the decision on the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria as an impending disaster, warning that the Islamic State is waiting in the wings for an opportunity to take back control over the Levant, with the title of the published article "America is planning to withdraw from Syria- and create a disaster."
Lister warns that the withdrawal should be "cause for significant concern" and that, while no decision has yet been reached by the Biden administration, the White House is "no longer invested in sustaining a mission that it perceives as unnecessary."
"Notwithstanding the catastrophic effect that a withdrawal would have on U.S. and allied influence over the unresolved and acutely volatile crisis in Syria, it would also be a gift to the Islamic State. While significantly weakened, the group is in fact primed for a resurgence in Syria, if given the space to do so," Lister summerized.
Lister claims that the United States's "unprecedented intervention" launched in 2014 by the Obama administration, alongside "80 partner nations," was "remarkably successful," without ever mentioning Iran's intervention to organize a strong resistance to the Islamic State in Iraq, nor the Russian Intervention to strengthen and reinforce Syria's military and air defenses.
Lister claims the situation in Syria is "more complex" than that of Iraq's, adding that "with approximately 900 troops on the ground, the United States is playing an instrumental role in containing and degrading a persistent Islamic State insurgency in northeastern Syria, working alongside its local partners, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)."
Again, Lister ignores the role played by the Russian military in providing air cover and tactical strikes on behalf of the Syrian military, warning that the threat from IS remains a serious cause for concern.
Lister points to a rocket attack launched against a prison maintained by U.S. proxy-forces to warn of the dangers in Syria, elaborating on the heroic defense of the so-called "Syrian Democratic Forces," comprised of a mix of jihadist groups, some with ties to al-Qaeda, that ran amok, sowing chaos and destabilizing Eastern Syria, until the Russian Intervention in September 2015, when U.S. proxy-forces were largely sequestered into the illegally U.S.-occupied territory in the eastern-most third of Syria.
Lister goes on to raise alarms over the security situation in western Syria too, where Syrian government forces, with the help of the Russian military, have since regained control of much of its territory formally under the control of jihadist groups.
"While U.S. troops and their SDF partners have managed to contain the Islamic State’s recovery in Syria’s northeast, the situation is far more concerning to the west—on the other side of the Euphrates River, where the Syrian regime is in control, at least on paper," Lister claims.
Lister, pushing for the U.S. to remain in Syria, says that "In this vast expanse of desert, the Islamic State has been engaged in a slow but methodical recovery, exploiting regime indifference and its inability to challenge a fluid desert-based insurgency."
Lister's alarmism goes on, describing the supposed regrouping of IS in various government-held regions of Syria, even going so far as to claim that the Islamic State has only been quiet in recent months due to employing a strategy of concealing its operations, never pointing to specific examples that might back those claims.
"For the past several years, the Islamic State has purposely concealed its level of operation in Syria, consistently choosing not to claim responsibility for attacks that it was conducting," the article claims, inversely suggesting the absence of activity by the extremist group is actually evidence of their malfeasance.
Lister also claims that the situation in the Gaza Strip is fueling the groups return, stating that the "war in Gaza and a spiraling regional crises are adding fuel to its fire and creating opportunities for the terror group to exploit the situation for its own advantage," without ever giving any concrete examples of how, where and in what way the group is returning, only citing research from his own shadily-funded organization's projects as evidence.
"According to the Counter Extremism Project, in 2023 alone, the Islamic State conducted at least 212 attacks in Syria’s central desert region, killing at least 502 people. As covert threats and overt attacks increase, reports are emerging with increasing frequency of desertions within regime ranks," Lister says.
Lister then claims that the United States is the only thing holding the region together even as he admits there's little the U.S. can do within territories controlled by the Syrian government.
That claim, that the U.S. is the glue holding Syria together, flies in the face of the countless warnings by both the Syrian and Russian governments that say the United States is in fact the source of instability in the region.
"While there is little that U.S. forces can do to alter Islamic State activities within the regime-controlled regions of Syria, U.S. troops are the glue holding together the only meaningful challenge to the Islamic State within a third of Syrian territory. Were that glue to disappear, a significant resurgence in Syria would be all but guaranteed, and a destabilizing spillover into Iraq a certainty."
Interestingly, Lister goes on to point to Iraq as an important player in the future of the Islamic State group, admitting that increased tensions created by the U.S. occupation in Iraq, along with the U.S support for Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, is creating a new push in the country to remove U.S. forces from Iraq by its parliament, creating a supposed opening for extremist groups in the region.
Lister puts the blame squarely on Iran for these openings, and for Iraq's growing impatience with Washington, adding that a troop withdrawal would be a bad idea, even invoking the collapse of U.S. proxy-forces in Afghanistan to warn of the dangers of a troop withdrawal from Syria.
"Ultimately, events since October have placed the U.S. deployment in northeast Syria on a fraying thread—hence recent internal consideration of a Syria withdrawal," Lister says, adding that "Given the disastrous consequences of the hurried exit from Afghanistan in 2021 and the impending U.S. election later this year, it is hard to grasp why the Biden administration would be considering a withdrawal from Syria."
Lister concludes that "no matter how such a withdrawal was conducted, it would trigger chaos and a swift surge in terror threats."
"There can be no denying the clear sense in policy circles that it is being actively considered—and that it has been accepted as an eventual inevitability," Lister claims.
Lister emphasized that anyone considering a collaborative approach with the Syrian government are making a big mistake, because "that would not only be a phenomenal boon to the Islamic State, but simply impossible on its own terms."
Lister explained that "part of the SDF may have periodic contact with Assad’s regime, but they are far from natural allies. The regime would never allow the SDF to sustain itself, and Turkey would do everything possible to kill what remained [of Washington's proxies]."
"The last time that the Islamic State surged in Syria, in 2014, it transformed international security in profoundly negative ways. Should a U.S. withdrawal precipitate a return to Islamic State chaos, we will be relegated to mere observers, unable to return to a region that we will have placed squarely under the control of a pariah regime and its Russian and Iranian allies."
