“Get them out!” Those were the words President-elect Donald Trump is said to have recently used to declare his desire to see America’s troops withdraw from Syria, according to an interview Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave to Tucker Carlson on Nov. 6. The sentiment does not come as much of a surprise, given that President Trump’s attempted to withdraw US forces from Syria twice during his first administration — once in December 2018 and again in October 2019. While both of those directives were later rolled back, they did cut the US presence in Syria’s northeast from roughly 2,500 troops to 900. If the incoming Trump administration is considering a Syria withdrawal, it should take the time to conduct an objective cost-benefit analysis.
A small force of 50 American troops first deployed to northeast Syria in late 2015 as part of efforts by a global coalition to defeat ISIS, within Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR). By early 2019, more than 42,000 square miles of territory across Iraq and Syria had been liberated, freeing eight million people from ISIS rule. While doing so, US forces played an instrumental role in training and equipping 225,000 security force partners to challenge ISIS and hold liberated territory. These efforts were not accomplished alone. At least 30 countries have contributed forces to the efforts on the ground, as part of what is now an 87-member coalition. The territorial defeat of ISIS was a historical victory, but it did not represent the end of the challenge. Far from it.
While ISIS has conducted just 53 attacks in Iraq so far in 2024, it has been behind more than 600 next door, in Syria. For now, ISIS is doubling its attack tempo across Syria compared to 2023, while tripling it in northeast Syria, where US forces operate alongside our Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) partners. ISIS’s recovery in Syria is partly the result of several years of rebuilding in the country’s central desert, a vast expanse of territory under the control of Bashar al-Assad and his regime, which lacks the will and the ability to effectively address the problem. ISIS also benefited from the effects of the 209 Iranian proxy attacks that targeted US troops in Iraq and Syria between October 2023 and February 2024. Fifty-six percent of those attacks were in Syria, where US forces had to remain in their bases for months at a time as a result — cutting the number of ISIS militants killed and captured in US operations by 72%.
With such operational restrictions resolved, US forces are now surging their efforts against ISIS, with 95 counter-ISIS operations recorded in Iraq and Syria in September and October 2024 alone. Such efforts are vitally needed, but they will take time to have an effect. ISIS’s ability to reconstitute and resurge in regime areas of Syria remains a thorny problem — one that US Central Command has taken boldly into its own hands in recent weeks, launching three rounds of heavy strikes on ISIS training camps that, until then, had been left alone by Assad, Russia, and Iran. Given the chaos that prevails across Syria and the regime’s inability to deal with the terrorist group, US troops are the glue holding together the only meaningful challenge to an ISIS resurgence.
Keeping US forces in Syria is not an expensive decision, with the 2023 OIR budget for Iraq and Syria totaling $5.5 billion — a significant majority of which is associated with activities in Iraq. All things considered, the Syria mission accounts for roughly 0.2% of the total US defense budget. The counter-ISIS mission in Syria and Iraq has also grown more cost efficient, with today’s overall budget being 60% less than in 2019. For a US taxpayer, the Syria mission currently costs approximately $8 per year, or 67 cents a month.
Beyond financial costs, the deployment of 900 troops in Syria is also a drop in the ocean within America’s global military footprint — representing just 0.5% of the 168,000 troops abroad on active duty, and 2% of the 43,000 currently in the Middle East. By contrast, approximately 80,000 US soldiers are currently on duty in South Korea and Japan. We even have 3,330 in Spain — nearly four times the number in Syria. Put bluntly, the idea that a troop presence in Syria somehow strains America’s ability to operate overseas is detached from reality.
While our presence on Syria soil is clearly a source of irritation for Assad’s regime and its Russian and Iranian allies, that is not a reason to concede and withdraw. In truth, the fact that our adversaries oppose us being present is precisely because of how significant a role our 900 servicemen and women play on the ground. This makes our role in Syria part and parcel of our broader posture within great power competition. Our presence in a quarter of Syria’s territory creates significant geopolitical leverage for the US in the region and presents a counterweight to American adversaries.
If Hamas’s brutal assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, taught us one thing, it was that abandoning unresolved crises to fester only ever leads to sudden and debilitating eruptions of violence. Syria and the ISIS challenge is no different. It is not risk free; but in nine years, the US military has lost just 10 soldiers in combat in Syria — and none since February 2022.
While the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq required hundreds of thousands of troops and cost as much as $100 billion per year each, the counter-ISIS mission in Syria costs a mere fraction of that — at most 2%. In fact, after taking everything into account, Syria offers a case study of extraordinary success achieved at record low levels of expense and risk. Such a light footprint approach, in close partnership with effective, loyal, and sustainable local partners, should be acknowledged by policymakers as the ideal model for dealing with the security challenges of the future. But importantly, the mission in Syria is far from over.
To abandon the mission now would bring no meaningful benefit to the US, but it would swiftly and significantly empower America’s adversaries, like ISIS, Iran, Russia, and Assad’s regime.
Charles Lister is a Senior Fellow and the Director of the Syria and Countering Terrorism & Extremism programs at the Middle East Institute.
Photo by DELIL SOULEIMAN/AFP via Getty Images
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