President Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria is a “disaster waiting to happen,” according to the House Democrats’ top foreign policy leader, who says an internal draft report from the Defense Department shows he’s right.
“If the President didn’t ignore his senior intelligence officials, perhaps he would arrive at the same conclusion,” House Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., said Friday.
Engel’s rebuke was spurred by word of a draft Pentagon report that suggests the remnants of the Islamic State could rehabilitate their self-declared caliphate within a year of a U.S. military exit. The New York lawmaker, one of the more hawkish members of his party — particularly with respect to countering Iranian influence in Syria and the wider region — predicted that the U.S. would have to return its forces to the country eventually.
“We don’t need hindsight to know that the president’s withdrawal plan in Syria is a disaster waiting to happen,” Engel said. “I want to see American troops come home as soon as possible, but it will be far more costly to return to Syria to combat a resurgent ISIS than to ensure this dangerous enemy is defeated now.”
Trump announced the impending withdrawal of U.S. forces in Syria in mid-December, to the surprise of American allies and some diplomats within his administration. That decision occurred as Pentagon experts drafted a document predicting dire consequences for the departure of the approximately 2,000 U.S. troops in the country.
“The draft says ISIS is intent on reconstituting a physical caliphate and that with ungoverned spaces in Syria and no military pressure, the terror group could retake land in a matter of months,” according to NBC.
Engel’s prediction isn’t unique. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a former Republican presidential rival of Trump’s who has recently partnered with the president over the Venezuela crisis, also urged the White House to change course while disputing that the Islamic State has been “eliminated” in Syria.
“And there is enough of them left that they can reconstitute itself,” he said on the Senate floor this week. “In fact, it’s in the process of doing so already. They are clearly capable of killing American servicemen, as they did a few days ago. And since that time, there have been a series of other IED attacks inside Syria, some of which could have killed Americans.”
