Trump loses envoy to anti-DAESH coalition

This news has been read 10998 times!

Turks mass troops near Manbij

WASHINGTON, Dec 23, (Agencies): Brett McGurk, the US envoy to the global coalition fighting the Islamic State group, has resigned in protest over President Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw US troops from Syria, joining Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in an administration exodus of experienced national security figures. McGurk described Trump’s decision as a “shock”.

Only 11 days ago, McGurk had said it would be “reckless” to consider IS defeated and therefore would be unwise to bring American forces home. McGurk decided to speed up his original plan to leave his post in mid-February. “The recent decision by the president came as a shock and was a complete reversal of policy,” he said in an email to his staff viewed by The Associated Press.

“It left our coalition partners confused and our fighting partners bewildered with no plan in place or even considered thought as to consequences.” McGurk, who was appointed by president Barack Obama in 2015 and retained by Trump, said in his resignation letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that the militants were on the run, but not yet defeated, and that the premature pullout of US forces from Syria would create the conditions that gave rise to IS.

The letter was submitted Friday and described to the AP on Saturday by an official familiar with its contents. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly before the letter was released and spoke on condition of anonymity. Trump played down the development, tweeting Saturday night that “I do not know” the envoy and it’s a “nothing event.” He noted McGurk planned to leave soon anyway and added: “Grandstander?” Shortly after news of Mc- Gurk’s resignation broke, Trump again defended his decision to pull all of the roughly 2,000 US forces from Syria in the coming weeks.

“We were originally going to be there for three months, and that was seven years ago – we never left,” Trump tweeted. “When I became President, ISIS was going wild. Now ISIS is largely defeated and other local countries, including Turkey, should be able to easily take care of whatever remains. We’re coming home!” Although the civil war in Syria has gone on since 2011, the US did not begin launching airstrikes against IS until September 2014, and American troops did not go into Syria until 2015.

McGurk, whose resignation is effective Dec 31, was planning to leave the job in mid- February after a US-hosted meeting of foreign ministers from the coalition countries, but he felt he could continue no longer after Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria and Mattis’ resignation. In his email to his staff, McGurk said: “I worked this week to help manage some of the fallout, but – as many of you heard in my many meetings and phone calls – I ultimately concluded that I could not carry out these new instructions and maintain my integrity at the same time.”

Trump’s declaration of a victory over IS has been roundly contradicted by his own experts’ assessments, and his decision to pull troops out was widely denounced by members of Congress, who called his action rash. Mattis, perhaps the most respected foreign policy official in the administration, announced on Thursday that he will leave by the end of February. He told Trump in a letter that he was departing because “you have a right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours.” The withdrawal decision will fulfill Trump’s goal of bringing troops home from Syria, but military leaders have pushed back for months, arguing that the IS group remains a threat and could regroup in Syria’s long-running civil war.

US policy has been to keep troops in place until the extremists are eradicated. Among officials’ key concerns is that a US pullout will leave USbacked Syrian Democratic Forces vulnerable to attacks by Turkey, the Syrian government and remaining IS fighters. The SDF, a Kurdish-led force, is America’s only military partner in Syria McGurk said at a State Department briefing on Dec 11 that “it would be reckless if we were just to say, ‘Well, the physical caliphate is defeated, so we can just leave now.’”

This news has been read 10998 times!