At a temporary military outpost bordering a natural gas field in eastern Syria, signs of the country’s violent upheaval can be found everywhere. Bombarded concrete buildings lie in rubble. The pipes that once carried liquefied natural gas are shredded and twisted.
A tattered American flag hoisted between 40-foot-tall gas-processing towers flies high above the base, a visible symbol that U.S. troops are here – and are not planning to leave any time soon.
“We planted the flagpole,” said Lieutenant Alan Favalora, a Louisiana National Guard soldier at Conoco. The name was given to the base of the long-lost American oil and gas company that once operated the wells. “We want them to know that we are committed to this region.”
However, how committed President Biden will be to keeping troops in Syria is not certain.
The Biden government does not appear to be in a hurry to pull out the 900 U.S. troops remaining in the country, a relatively small force that some White House officials see as key to preventing an Islamic State revival. and a rush to reclaim the area. oil fields by Syrian President Bashar Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies.
But White House officials said they were reviewing the presence of troops in Syria – an announcement that raised concerns that Biden could reconsider deployment as part of a larger downsizing of U.S. troops in the Middle East and a planned shift of focus from the Pentagon to Asia. .
What Biden is going to do ‘is the one question I got from everyone’, said Genl. Kenneth ‘Frank’ McKenzie jr., The leading U.S. commander in the Middle East, said in an interview after visiting eastern Syria on Friday. “I think the new government will look at this, and then we will get guidance.”
Robert Ford, who was an ambassador to Syria during the Obama administration, called the US strategy “deeply flawed” and said Biden should provide the remaining troops who helped the Syrian Democratic Forces – a Kurdish-led militia – a semi-autonomous enclave in the country’s northeast.
“I do not think it’s worth it,” Ford said of the US deployment in an interview. Islamic State “is largely restricted and unable to threaten the American homeland or even send fighters to Europe.”
The Arab population in northeastern Syria initially supported Kurdish militias’ efforts to oust the Islamic State. But many Arabs are now upset that they are under the Kurds’ government, which is creating a new source of recruits while the Islamic State tries to recover, Ford added.
Conoco is one of several small outposts used by US troops and the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, to carve out an enclave outside Assad’s control. It has brought relative stability to a part of a country fighting a decade-old civil war that has claimed an awful human toll.
Hundreds of thousands of people have died since the outbreak of civil war in 2011; in 2016, the United Nations estimated the number at 400,000. According to the United Nations, millions more – half the population – have been displaced or fled the country.
The Syrian army is waging its own fight against the Islamic State, intensified by Russian mercenaries, Iranian revolutionary guard advisers and Iran-backed irregularities from Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. The Syrian forces are backed by Russian warplanes and Iranian drones.
Russian and Syrian troops are just across the Euphrates River from Conoco, but both sides avoid straying into the other’s territory.
“There’s a very hard line,” Favalora said. “They can not come here, and we can not go there.”
In 2018, hundreds of Russian mercenaries and military members of the government were killed by US airstrikes and artillery as they crossed the Euphrates, just miles away from Conoco.
The U.S. partnership with the SDF has helped strengthen its control over eastern Syria, which has created an alternative to Assad’s rule and perhaps a bargaining panel as efforts to reach a political settlement of the civil war continue.
But keeping troops in eastern Syria also helps the Pentagon control the border between Iraq and Syria, which contains the growing influence of Iran in the region.
There are few traces of Islamic State fighters who captured much of eastern Syria and Iraq, including the wells, until they were driven out by Kurdish and Arab militias aided by U.S. airstrikes and special forces troops. U.S. officials say the group has fewer than 10,000 followers, many of whom are forced into remote mountain or desert areas, making it impossible to hold large parts of the area or carry out mass attacks, especially in areas affected by the SDF is controlled.
“We believe they still want to strive” in Syria and Iraq, McKenzie said. “But it’s hard for them to get together, because if they do, we’ll get it.”
Since the Biden government first began considering options in Syria, U.S. military commanders are careful not to rule out further withdrawals. But they warn that an exit, coupled with cuts to air support, intelligence and other assistance to the SDF, will create a security vacuum that the Islamic State can exploit.
“What would happen if we withdrew is a question we need to look at,” McKenzie said. “Because we are there, there is an element of stability.”
U.S. officials warn that a withdrawal of U.S. troops is likely to paralyze the SDF, forcing Kurdish fighters to retreat to an even smaller area in northeastern Syria and reach an agreement with Assad.
It could also lead to escapes at the Kurdish detention camps that hold thousands of Islamic State fighters and the militants’ relatives and sympathizers out of the pressure refugee camps. An estimated 70,000 people who once lived under the rule of the Islamic State are in Al Hol, the main detention center run by Kurds, about 50 kilometers south of the Turkish border.
Biden finds military disengagement from the steward of militias, outside forces and regime forces working in Syria difficult. His first publicly known military action was to order an air strike on a camp in Syria near the border with Iraq in February in retaliation for an Iranian-backed militia attack on a U.S. base in Iraq.
How to bring about a response to the chaos in Syria, US officials have been intoxicated since the beginning of the civil war.
With the aim of reducing the US military presence in the region, former President Obama focused on humanitarian aid and on political negotiations to remove Assad. Obama has approved secret military aid in hopes of creating a moderate Syrian rebel force as an opponent for more militant fighters, a half-hearted effort that has yielded scarce results.
After Assad used sarin and other chemical agents against rebel-held areas near Damascus, the capital and in the northern province of Aleppo, in 2013, Obama prepared military retaliation against the government, but canceled the attack shortly before it would begin.
When the Islamic State emerged in 2014 and seized a third of Syria and Iraq for its so-called caliphate, Obama rushed troops back to Iraq and approved airstrikes in Syria. In Kobani, a city in northern Syria, near the Turkish border, US airstrikes helped Kurdish fighters end an siege by the Islamic State.
Former President Trump has repeatedly vowed to pull out after the near-total defeat of the Islamic State in early 2019. He announced his withdrawal in December following a U.S. raid on Islamic State leader Abu Bakr Baghdadi. But the president backed down after Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis resigned in protest, warning White House advisers that the Islamic State could withdraw too quickly.
Last year, Trump ordered U.S. troops to be removed from the northern border near Turkey as part of a planned move to withdraw all U.S. troops from the country. But under Pentagon pressure, he later agreed to keep U.S. troops in the east to continue with the SDF and to help protect oil fields against the Islamic State.
Now, in Green Village, another base in Syria, just east of the Euphrates River, American soldiers are being housed in dilapidated apartments once used by oilfielders. A massive M777 artillery rifle sits mostly idle because there are not many Islamic State fighters to target, military lieutenant Melissa Cardona said.
But every two weeks, soldiers fire a long-range salvo into remote areas where the group’s fighters are hiding, according to Cardona, just to remind them “that we’re still here.”