Update From Syria: We Still Have People There

And we are still in Syria because….?  The Kurdish group (Syrian Democratic Forces) seems to be taking their full share of responsibility in Syria. Most of our troops have been recalled. However, according to the article below, we still have 900 people there, and the place is a mess everywhere.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/03/13/inside-us-troops-stronghold-syria-question-of-how-long-biden-will-keep-them-there.html

From the article:   How committed President Biden will be to keeping troops in Syria is uncertain, however.

The Biden administration does not appear to be in any rush to pull out the 900 U.S. troops who remain in the country, a relatively small force that some White House officials see as key to preventing a resurgence of Islamic State and a rush to reclaim the area’s oil fields by Syrian President Bashar Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies.

But White House officials have said they are reviewing the troop presence in Syria — an announcement that has raised concerns that Biden could reconsider the deployment as part of a larger scaling back of U.S. troops in the Middle East and a planned shift of Pentagon focus to Asia.

What Biden is going to do “is the one question I got from everybody,” Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie Jr., the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, said in an interview after visiting eastern Syria on Friday. “I think the new administration is going to look at this, and then we’re going to get guidance.”

Robert Ford, who was an ambassador to Syria during the Obama administration, called the U.S. strategy “deeply flawed” and said Biden should withdraw the remaining troops who have helped the Syrian Democratic Forces — a Kurdish-led militia — carve out a semiautonomous enclave in the country’s northeast. – article

Gee whiz, and I thought that it was all settled over there before Trump took office. What did I miss? And why do we still  have people there?

Category: 2020 Election, Biden, Syria