Trump's Pullout Leaves Russia Holding the Cards in Syria, to Israel's Bitter Disappointment by Amos Harel – Haaretz
The Donald Trump administration’s snap decision to withdraw 2,200 US troops from the battlefield in Syria today came from a familiar source: the president himself.
“We have defeated [the Islamic State] in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” Trump wrote in a morning tweet just hours after the Wall Street Journal first reported the news.
The move once again scrambles US policy toward the Middle East, coming as the Trump administration had begun to coalesce around a three-tiered policy for the war in Syria that seeks the lasting defeat of the Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS), Iran’s withdrawal and an irreversible political settlement backed by the United Nations at talks in Geneva. That process seeks changes to Syria’s constitution and government and possibly President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster.
As recently as this month, US officials were telling Al-Monitor they believed they had unique leverage to bring Russia and Iran, which would soon seek to stop paying Assad’s mounting military bills, to the bargaining table. On Tuesday, UN-brokered talks to convene a new constitutional committee broke down, though the sides promised to resume talks in January…