The large U.S. military presence in Syria will pose an early dilemma for Trump

The Assad regime’s abrupt collapse has thrust America’s long-standing military mission in Syria into uncertainty, as the Pentagon’s chief battlefield partner fights for survival and a U.S. leader skeptical of foreign military commitments prepares to retake power.

President-elect Donald Trump will encounter a transformed Middle East when he begins his second term next month and increasingly urgent questions about the future for roughly 2,000 U.S. troops positioned in eastern Syria where, for more than a decade, Washington has used an array of outposts to combat the Islamic State and monitor the activities of adversary Iran.

The new realities in Syria underscore the dramatic changes wrought across the region in the wake of Hamas militants’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which unleashed punishing wars in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, set off unprecedented attacks between Iran and Israel, and left Tehran’s most powerful proxies severely weakened.

Trump, who repeatedly threatened to pull U.S. forces from Syria during his first term and has sought in recent days to distance the United States from the upheaval now gripping the country, has not revealed his plans for the U.S. military mission there. But he and his advisers have signaled that a top priority will be containing the Islamic State, which no longer boasts the vast pseudo-state it once controlled but has regrouped in Syria’s southern desert, where U.S. forces have pounded the militants with intense airstrikes in recent days.

James Jeffrey, who served as Syria envoy during Trump’s first term, noted that Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Sunni Islamist movement that toppled Assad and has embraced a role as Syria’s new government, had been successful in battling the Islamic State in the past, a fact that could intensify questions for the incoming president.

“Trump is going to ask, ‘Why do I have to keep … troops on to fight ISIS, when essentially all of our fighting is mainly bombing them in the desert?’” Jeffrey said. “And it’s going to be very hard to answer that question.”

Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Florida), the retired Special Forces officer whom Trump tapped to be national security adviser, has said that Trump will prioritize limiting foreign entanglements but also has described preventing an the Islamic State resurgence as a “number one priority,” leaving it unclear what military strategy the new administration might pursue.

“The president has been crystal clear on and his mandate from the voters was to do everything he can to avoid us getting [dragged] into more Middle East wars,” Waltz told Fox News in a recent interview. “But in Syria, he is clear-eyed about the threat of ISIS that’s still there. … We have to keep a lid on it.”

Trump’s transition team did not respond to a request for comment.

Both Trump’s team and the Biden administration, which sent senior diplomats to Syria this week for the first time in more than a decade, are proceeding with caution in dealing with HTS, which was first formed as an offshoot of al-Qaeda. While the group has promised stability and inclusion, it remains on the U.S. list of foreign terrorist groups.

Syria’s new interim leader, HTS commander Ahmed al-Sharaa, has called for militias across Syria to be demobilized but has not explicitly said whether his government would like the United States to stay.

Officials at the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command (Centcom), which oversees operations across the Middle East, have held planning meetings that examined how the fate of Syria is intertwined with the ongoing upheaval across the Middle East, according to a defense official, who like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations.

The stakes for the United States, with American personnel operating at small, exposed bases, are high, as they are in neighboring Iraq and Jordan. Since the Gaza war began, Iranian-backed militias have carried out at least 211 attacks on U.S. forces with one-way attack drones, rockets, and other munitions, including one that killed three U.S. soldiers just over the Syrian border in Jordan in January, according to Pentagon data. More than 130 of those attacks targeted American positions in Syria.

The mounting questions come as the Pentagon for the first time on Thursday acknowledged that senior military officials had for months withheld that the military presence in Syria had more than doubled this year from roughly 900 troops to about 2,000. Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, a spokesman, said he had just become aware of the expansion, and that officials sometimes withhold such information due to “diplomatic and operational security considerations.”

The United States is not the only foreign nation forced by Assad’s ouster to rethink its military presence in Syria. For years Tehran sent forces and funds to Syria, which served as a base for Iran to threaten archrival Israel. With Assad gone, those links are severed. Since 2015, Russia played a key role enabling the former regime’s fight against rebel challengers. Moscow has consolidated its forces in coastal Syria in recent days and, like Washington, has made no definitive statements about its future there.

A chief factor in shaping the future of the U.S. mission will probably be the future arrangements between Kurdish authorities in northeast Syria and the new HTS-led government in Damascus, and how far the United States will go in protecting the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Kurdish-led group that has been the United States’ chief partner in battling the Islamic State.

While the SDF has proved a dogged companion in that fight, its hope of securing lasting autonomy has long generated friction between Washington and its NATO ally Turkey, which considers the SDF to be part of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the Kurdish group it has battled for decades.

Under pressure from Ankara, the United States brokered a deal between the SDF and Turkish-backed Arab militias pushing to assert control in northern Syria. That agreement, which required the SDF to withdraw from the city of Manbij, represented a loss as the group seeks to keep Arab forces away from Kobane, a majority-Kurdish city close to Syria’s border with Turkey. It now appears likely that Turkish-backed Syrian fighters will attempt to take Kobane, a symbolic priority for Syria’s Kurds.

According to Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, the SDF is in a “very, very challenged” position as non-Kurdish fighters within the group’s ranks have fled and leaders question how long they will have U.S. support. “They’re more vulnerable than they’ve ever been,” he said.

Also of top concern for U.S. officials are the prisons and camps housing Islamic State militants and family members that are now guarded by SDF forces.

Farhad Shamsi, a spokesman for the SDF, said his group’s coordination with American forces had intensified because of the evolving threat from the Islamic State. Shamsi warned that militants were attempting to push into northeast Syria and some, he claimed, were joining Turkish-backed groups the SDF has battled in recent days.

“We hope that they will maintain their presence here in Syria, especially in this critical situation, because we think that ISIS will be resurging,” Shamsi said, adding that the SDF was worried Turkey would not heed American efforts to defuse tensions and the new authorities in Damascus had not provided firm guarantees about the group’s role in a future Syria if a broad national pact can be reached.

Joseph Votel, a retired general and former Centcom commander, said the United States’ standing with other partners could suffer if it abandons them.

“I think we ought to be putting more and more pressure on Turkey to cease their operations and those by the SNA,” he said, referring to the Syrian National Army, a military forced backed by Ankara. Kurdish forces have more experience than do other groups in Syria countering the Islamic State, Votel said, warning, “We could be creating a situation here where ISIS can regain and reestablish themselves,” he said.

The turmoil in Syria has also raised questions about the future of the U.S. mission in neighboring Iraq, which has served as a security and logistics hub for counterinsurgency operations in both countries. While U.S. forces have helped Iraq combat its own challenges with the Islamic State and acted as a counterweight to Iran’s influence in the region, the American troop presence is a sensitive topic for the country’s leaders.

Talks are ongoing with the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani in Baghdad about the implementation of a bilateral agreement that would dismantle by the fall of 2025 the U.S.-led military coalition established to fight the Islamic State in Iraq. While American officials have not said whether any of the U.S. force of roughly 2,500 would stay beyond that time, Iraqi officials say an additional agreement would remove most of them by 2026.

Now, that may be changing. One senior Iraqi official said there has been a shift in how senior Iraqi officials regard a potential U.S. withdrawal “after recent developments in the region.”

The existing deadline for withdrawing troops “now seems distant,” the official said. But as it nears, he added, “I highly anticipate that Iraq will officially request an extension” permitting U.S. forces to stay.

In a Dec. 13 meeting in Baghdad with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Sudani seemed to have a fresh appreciation for the U.S. deployment given the upheaval in Syria, according to a U.S. official familiar with the conversation. Iraqi officials were also more welcoming than they had been of U.S. requests to station reconnaissance assets near Iraq’s border with Syria, the official said, though Sudani did not request an extension of the American military presence.

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Birnbaum and Salim reported from Baghdad.