Call it a forever war.
US troops are fighting ISIS in Syria. But Congress hasn’t approved it, the public hardly knows about it, and it’s not clear under what conditions the US would leave.
Americans tend to only be reminded of the 900 US troops and hundreds of contractors stationed there when they came under attack, often from militants who have Iran’s support, or when there is a mishap — like this week.
In northeast Syria on Sunday, 22 US soldiers from an elite commando unit were injured in a helicopter’s “hard landing” due to a technical issue, according to the Pentagon.
More broadly this spring, US bases have been coming under attack from Iranian-backed groups, with the potential for the US troops there to be drawn into a broader conflict.
The US is in Syria to curb the terrorist group Islamic State or ISIS, in a region that is semi-autonomous and run by the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish group.
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said that troops are needed because “if you completely ignore and turn your back, then you’re setting the conditions for a resurgence.”
But experts say that the US troops there are not building toward a sustainable outcome, and that resisting ISIS has become the pretext for a perpetual US presence.
“It’s a strategy that just makes no sense,” says Robert Ford, who served as US ambassador to Syria from 2011 to 2014. “The real way forward is not leaving 900 troops to play whack-a-mole in eastern Syria.”
Ford explains that the American mission to secure the outright defeat of ISIS is impossible. The 900 troops in the northeast of Syria and the US garrison at al-Tanf cannot stop a low level of recruitment into ISIS ranks. “So we can bomb some and we can kill some, but they’ll always replace the people that they lose,” he told me. “This is a classic forever war.”
Why the US is in Syria
The Biden administration says its Syria policy is working. “I take…
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