BICOM

US President Donald Trump has extended the deadline for US forces to leave Syria, reversing his original order of 19 December to withdraw troops within 30 days.

President Trump wrote on twitter: “We’re slowly sending our troops back home to be with their families, while at the same time fighting ISIS remnants.” His decision to withdraw troops within 30 days was widely criticised, including by senior Republican Lindsey Graham (R-SC). After Trump’s announcement of a gradual withdrawal, Graham tweeted: “The President will make sure any withdrawal from Syria will be done in a fashion to ensure: 1) ISIS is permanently destroyed. 2) Iran doesn’t fill in the back end, and 3) our Kurdish allies are protected.”

According to the New York Times: “Military planners say they need about 120 days, or four months, to carry out a withdrawal that allows time to decide which equipment to move elsewhere in the region, leave behind with allies or disable to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Syrian government or Russia or Iran”.

Two senior figures in the US administration have resigned since Trump’s announcement, including Secretary of Defence Jim Mattis and Special Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS, Brett McGurk. In his resignation letter, which was viewed as a strong rebuke of Trump’s decision, Mattis wrote: “While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies.” In an email to his colleagues, McGurk wrote that: “The recent decision by the president came as a shock and was a complete reversal of policy that was articulated to us. It left our coalition partners confused and our fighting partners bewildered”.

In a bilateral meeting in Brazil on Tuesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that: “The counter-ISIS campaign continues, our efforts to counter Iranian aggression continue and our commitment to Middle East stability and the protection of Israel continues in the same way it did before that decision was made.” Netanyahu said the two countries would be discussing: “The intense cooperation between Israel and the United States which will also deal with the questions following the decision, the American decision, on Syria and how to intensify even further our intelligence and operational cooperation in Syria and elsewhere to block Iranian aggression in the Middle East.”