1/17/19
Wednesday's attack on U.S. forces in Syria has stoked fresh criticism over President Donald Trump's claim that the so-called Islamic State has been defeated renewed debate over his decision to withdraw all troops from the war-torn country. Four Americans were killed — two service members, a civilian Pentagon official and a U.S. contractor — and three more injured, U.S. Central Command confirmed in a statement, reportedly marking the largest single loss of American life since the counter-ISIS campaign began. Nineteen people are believed to have died in total, including civilians and local coalition partners, according to monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. ISIS quickly claimed responsibility. "Trump's order was reckless and driven far more by domestic political concerns than it was by facts on the ground," Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, said on Twitter Wednesday. Trump defended the troop pullout plans on the premise that ISIS had been defeated. The decision triggered rebukes from numerous lawmakers and security experts, who warned of the extremist group's resurgence and lamented what was seen as an abandonment of local partners.
"Sometimes reality catches up quickly with wishful thinking and political spin," Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., told CNBC on Wednesday. "Historians will likely file Trump's tweets announcing the ISIS defeat and U.S. Syria pullout alongside Bush's 2003 'Mission Accomplished' speech and Obama's 2011 withdrawal from Iraq." "The attack in Manbij demonstrates clearly that ISIS still has an extensive network of operatives throughout the areas it used to control in Syria, and that it wants the world to know that," said Nick Heras, a Middle East security fellow at the Center for a New American Security and former research associate at the National Defense University. "ISIS likely timed the attack to send the message to Trump that he hasn't beat it yet, and to the world that the Americans will lose the long war against it." Just hours before the attack, Vice President Mike Pence told a group of U.S. ambassadors gathered in Washington that "The caliphate has crumbled, and ISIS has been defeated." Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass drove this point home. "The apparent ISIS attack in Syria a costly reminder that there is no such thing as victory in any traditional sense vs terrorists," he said on Twitter. "This is one reason why 'war' is not a good term in this context as classic wars have an end but struggles vs terrorists are unavoidably open ended."
