Aftandilian in The Arab Weekly on U.S. Syria Withdrawal
Gregory Aftandilian, Lecturer at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published a recent Op-Ed on how United States Defense Secretary Mark Esper has tried to mitigate the fallout from President Donald Trump’s Syria withdrawal decision.
Aftandilian’s Op-Ed, entitled “Wary of ISIS Resurgence, Esper Trying to Mitigate US Withdrawal Fallout,” was published in The Arab Weekly on October 26, 2019.
From the text of the article:
US President Donald Trump, after congratulating himself for achieving a supposed diplomatic victory in the Turkish-Syrian-Kurdish crisis in which he stated that the ceasefire would be “permanent,” said he decided to keep a residual force in eastern Syria to guard oil fields.
US officials subsequently said this would involve about 200 troops around the oil fields of Deir ez-Zor. The United States would also maintain 100-150 troops at a base in Al-Tanf, near the Jordanian border. Hence, there will not be a “complete withdrawal” of US troops from Syria that Trump pledged to achieve only a couple of weeks ago.
The impetus for maintaining about 350 US troops in Syria (out of the 1,000 in the country in early October) seems to have come from US Defence Secretary Mark Esper, who is known as a level-headed professional doing his best to try to mitigate the fallout from Trump’s erratic policy decisions.
Esper is also dealing with sagging morale among the military, especially US special forces who worked closely with the Syrian Kurds in the fight against the Islamic State (ISIS). Some of those forces, speaking anonymously, said they felt a sense of “shame” following the decision to withdraw from northern Syria, leaving their Kurdish allies to face the Turkish onslaught.
Gregory Aftandilian, a consultant, scholar, and lecturer, is an adjunct faculty member at Boston University and American University. He is also an associate of the Middle East Center at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell and a Senior Fellow for the Middle East at the Center for National Policy in Washington, D.C. He spent over 21 years in government service, most recently on Capitol Hill where he was foreign policy adviser to Congressman Chris Van Hollen (2007-2008), professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and foreign policy adviser to Senator Paul Sarbanes (2000-2004), and foreign policy fellow to the late Senator Edward Kennedy (1999).