This decision comes almost three months after the arrival of Donald Trump’s power, which has long opposed the US presence in the country and defended the return to an isolationist policy from the US.
The Pentagon announced Friday that it will reduce the two thousand US military currently featured in Syria to combat Islamic extremists, predicting the departure in the coming months.
The United States has had a military presence in Syria for years, namely as part of the International Coalition against the Islamic State Group (IS). The IS was defeated in 2019, but the cells remained active.
This decision comes almost three months after the arrival of Donald Trump’s power, which has long opposed the US presence in the country and defended the return to an isolationist policy from the US.
The announcement of “reducing US presence in Syria to less than a thousand soldiers in the coming months,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement.
“This consolidation demonstrates the significant steps we have given to degrade the resource and operational capabilities of the Islamic State Group in the region and around the world,” he said, referring more widely to “US success against IS.”
Donald Trump has long been skeptical of the military presence in Syria, and the fall in late December of Bashar Al-Assad, replaced in the country’s leadership by an Islamist coalition, did not change the situation.
“Syria is chaos, but it’s not our friend, (…) it’s not our fight,” wrote Donald Trump in December on the occasion of the offensive that put a 50 -year indivisible mastery of the Assad clan.
The seizure of vast areas of Syria and Iraq by the IS, from 2014, triggered the intervention of an international coalition led by the United States, whose main objective was to support, from the air, the units of the Iraqi Army and the Kurds that fought IS on the ground.
But Washington also sent thousands of his soldiers to support these local troops and conduct their own military operations.
Following the victory against IS, declared in 2017 in Iraq and 2019 in Syria, a US military presence remained on the ground to persecute the remaining cells of extremist groups.
At the end of December, the administration of former Democratic President Joe Biden, who was in power at the time, announced that the number of US troops in Syria had increased during the previous months, although Washington claimed for years that he had 900 soldiers on the ground.
The United States Army “will remain ready to make attacks on what remains of IS in Syria,” said the Pentagon spokesman, according to which the US maintains “significant abilities in the region.”
The United States has about 2,500 staff in Iraq, a presence that is expected to decrease.
Safety in Syria has been precarious since the fall of Bashar al-Assad after nearly 14 years of war triggered by violent repression of the old manifestations in 2011.
