US plans complete withdrawal of troops from Syria, Trump declares ISIS defeated

The United States is planning a total withdrawal of US forces from Syria as it nears the very end of its campaign to retake all of the territory once held by Islamic State, multiple US officials told US media outlets on Thursday.
Such a decision, if confirmed, would upend assumptions about a longer-term US military presence in Syria, which US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis and other senior US officials had advocated to help ensure Islamic State cannot re-emerge.
Still, President Donald Trump has previously expressed a strong desire to bring troops home from Syria when possible. On Wednesday, Trump appeared to declare victory against the group and made clear he saw no further grounds for remaining in Syria.

We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2018

The timing of the troop withdrawal was not immediately clear but a defence officials who spoke to the Washington Post amd the Wall Street Journal said it would occur as quickly as possible. One official told Reuters that partners and allies had been consulted.
The defence official told the Washington Post that the decision was made on Tuesday and would include the entire force of more than 2,000 US service members.
Many of the 2,000 US troops in Syria are special operations forces working closely with an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF.
The partnership with the SDF over the past several years has led to the defeat of Islamic State in Syria but outraged NATO ally Turkey, which views Kurdish YPG forces in the alliance as an extension of a militant group fighting inside Turkey.
The deliberations on US troops come as Ankara threatens a new offensive in Syria. To date, US forces in Syria have been seen as a stabilising factor in the country and have somewhat restrained Turkey's actions against the SDF.
A complete withdrawal of US troops from Syria would still leave a sizeable US military presence in the region, including about 5,200 troops across the border in Iraq.
Much of the US campaign in Syria has been waged by warplanes flying out of Qatar and other locations in the Middle East.

Still, Mattis and US State Department officials have long fretted about leaving Syria before a peace agreement can be reached to end that country's brutal civil war, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced around half of Syria’s pre-war population of about 22 million.
In April, Mattis said: "We do not want to simply pull out before the diplomats have won the peace. You win the fight - and then you win the peace."
Islamic State is also widely expected to revert to guerilla tactics once it no longer holds territory.
A US withdrawal could open Trump up to criticism if Islamic State re-emerged.
Trump has previously lambasted his predecessor, Barack Obama, for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq that preceded an unravelling of the Iraqi armed forces. Iraqi forces collapsed in the face of Islamic State's advance into the country in 2014.
Last 1 per cent
Islamic State declared its so-called "caliphate" in 2014 after seizing large swathes of Syria and Iraq. The hardline Islamist group established its de facto capital in the Syrian city of Raqqa, using it as a base to plot attacks in Europe.
According to US estimates, the group oversaw about 100,000 square kilometres of territory, with about 8 million people under Islamic State control. It had estimated revenues of nearly one billion dollars a year.
Brett McGurk, the US special envoy for the global coalition to defeat Islamic State, said last week that the group was down to its last 1 per cent of the territory it once held in its self-styled "caliphate". The group has no remaining territory in Iraq.
Hajin, the group's last major stronghold in Syria, is close to being seized by US-backed SDF forces.
After losing Hajin, Islamic State will control a diminishing strip of territory along the eastern bank of the Euphrates River in the area where US-backed operations are focused. The militants also control some desert terrain west of the river in territory otherwise controlled by the Damascus government and its allies.
But US officials have warned that taking back the group's territory would not be the same as defeating it.
"Even as the end of the physical caliphate is clearly now coming into sight, the end of ISIS will be a much more long-term initiative," McGurk told a State Department briefing on December 11.