Donald Trump is reported to have ordered a full, rapid withdrawal of over 2,000 US troops in Syria, declaring victory over the Islamic State, and taking allies and his own advisers by surprise.
Pentagon and state department officials were left scrambling to interpret an abrupt change in course from the US policy decided over the summer to keep forces in Syria to ensure the “enduring defeat of Isis” and act as a bulwark against Iranian influence.
Senior officials were informed of the president’s decision on Tuesday night, and after news reports of the U-turn surfaced on Wednesday morning, Trump tweeted: “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.”
We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2018
Trump’s claim is at odds with his own administration’s assessments. In August this year, the Pentagon assessed there were still as many as 14,500 Isis fighters in Syria.
“That’s intelligence that is presumably sat on Trump’s desk while he proclaims victory this morning,” said Charles Lister, director of countering terrorism and extremism at the Middle East Institute, who pointed out that Isis had claimed responsibility for an attack in its former stronghold of Raqqa only minutes before Trump’s tweet.
Both the UK and France have troops in Syria and the UK’s junior defence minister, Tobias Ellwood, rejected Trump’s claim that Isis had been defeated in Syria.
“I strongly disagree. It has morphed into other forms of extremism and the threat is very much alive,” Ellwood said in a tweet.
Later on Wednesday morning, the White House spokeswoman, Sarah Sanders, put out a more nuanced statement saying that troop withdrawal marked the start of the “next phase” in the struggle with Isis, and suggested they could return if necessary.
“Five years ago, Isis was a very powerful and dangerous force in the Middle East, and now the United States has defeated the territorial caliphate,” Sanders said. “ We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign.”
After the Trump tweet and the White House statement, the state department cancelled a scheduled press briefing. After initially insisting that nothing had changed, the Pentagon put out its own statement echoing the White House language about the “next phase of the campaign” against Isis, but saying it had only “started the process” of withdrawal, and giving no timetable.
Reuters quoted a US official as saying the troop pullout would take between 60 and 100 days.
Behind the scenes, the Pentagon leadership was still trying to persuade the president to accept a managed, more gradual withdrawal, according to sources familiar with the discussions.
The outgoing chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, Bob Corker, was due to meet the president, but the meeting was cancelled without explanation at the last minute.
“I’ve never seen a decision like this since I’ve been here in 12 years,” Corker told reporters later. “It is hard to imagine that any president would wake up and make this kind of decision, with little communication, with this little preparation.”
The senator was asked if the US presence was being pulled out entirely.
“Yes, entirely,” he replied.
NGOs supporting US agencies bringing water and sanitation back to the ruined town of Raqqa were told on Wednesday morning to make plans for rapid departure, said Nicholas Heras, a fellow at the Centre for a New American Security.
“This is a chaotic decision, hastily made with no consultation with anyone responsible for the actual nuts and bolts of withdrawal,” Heras said. “They have been caught with their pants down.”
The state department declined to comment, for “operational and security reasons”, on a Reuters report that its personnel in Syria had been told to evacuate within 24 hours. US state department and aid workers are heavily involved in the stabilisation effort in Raqqa and other towns recaptured from Isis.
An abrupt US withdrawal would mean abandoning Washington’s closest ally inside Syria, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which has done most of the fighting in clearing Isis fighters out of its strongholds. They are being threatened with a cross-border offensive from Turkey, which sees them as indistinguishable from Kurdish Workers’ party (PKK) militants inside Turkey.
Trump talked to the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, by phone on Friday, and Erdogan later said he had received some “positive answers” from his US counterpart on the tense situation in north-eastern Syria.
The state department later said it had approved the sale of Patriot ground-to-air missiles to Turkey, while Sanders said Trump would “take a look” at Ankara’s demand for the extradition of Fethullah Gülen, a dissident Turkish cleric living in the US.
Trump has called for immediate withdrawal from Syria before, but had previously been persuaded by allies and his advisers to stay on to finish the fight against Isis and to contain Iran. His own administration believes that Isis still has a residual but significant presence inside Syria.
“We are well along in clearing Isis from the ground that they’ve held in Syria [but] we still have a lot of work to do in terms of the stabilisation phase,” the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Joseph Dunford, said earlier this month. Dunford said US soldiers had only progressed 20% along the way towards its target of training up to 40,000 local fighters to keep Isis in check.
Both the UK and France have small numbers of special forces in north-eastern Syria.
Trump’s own national security adviser, John Bolton, is adamantly opposed to the decision, for different reasons. At the UN general assembly in September Bolton declared: “We’re not going to leave as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders and that includes Iranian proxies and militias.” A diplomatic source described him as “livid” about the president’s decision.
A senior administration official shrugged off questions about the very different messages coming from Trump and his top advisers.
“It was the president decision to make and he made it,” the official said. “He gets to do that. That’s his prerogative.”
Lindsey Graham, a senior Republican senator who is a Trump loyalist on most issues, denounced the decision, calling it “an Obama-like mistake made by the Trump administration”. He added that the US troops in Syria were “vital to our national security interests”.
The defence secretary, James Mattis, has consistently argued that the US troops served a vital national interest by maintaining the offensive against residual Isis pockets and a signal of intent not to cede Syria to Iranian control.