What’s Left For the U.S. To Do in Syria?
The Assad dynasty has fallen. After 54 years of Assad family rule, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad quietly fled the capital city of Damascus on Saturday night, seeking asylum in Russia. The government that had clung onto power through military force for so long crumbled in the face of a sudden uprising led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, former head of Al Qaeda in Syria who later fought against Al Qaeda and founded an independent Islamist organization.
The United States did not expect Assad to fall, but it now has many cards to play in influencing the postwar situation. President Joe Biden gloated on Sunday that his policies have “shifted the balance of power in the Middle East,” and promised to keep U.S. troops on the ground in Syria. Although President-elect Donald Trump personally said that Syria is “not our fight,” he bashed the Obama administration for not getting involved more decisively. Members of Trump’s circle also seem eager to shape the postwar outcome.
“I think Abu Muhammad al-Jolani must be delusional if he thinks that Syrians, having seen the departure of a 54-yr dictatorship yesterday, will sit still as he installs himself as another dictator in Assad’s place,” wrote Joel Rayburn, a former Trump administration official who is reportedly part of Trump’s new National Security Council, in a social media post. Regime change in Syria has been one of Rayburn’s pet projects for a long time.
Jolani’s forces were not the first to enter Damascus. A motley coalition of local militias with ties to Jordanian and U.S. intelligence beat him to the punch. (“They’re very different [from Jolani]. We know a lot of them,” a senior Biden administration official told reporters on Sunday.) Still, Jolani is the kingmaker, if not the king. After entering Damascus, he gave a victory speech and installed one of his loyalists as the new prime minister.
Along with its indirect support for rebels, the U.S. military currently has “approximately 900” troops stationed in Syria, some of them stationed alongside Kurdish-led rebels known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, and some of them sitting at a lonely outpost on the Jordanian border known as al-Tanf. Although these forces were originally sent to fight the Islamic State, they have since become a tool for countering Iran and Russia, the Assad government’s old backers. In a show of force on Sunday, the U.S. military bombed 75 alleged Islamic State hideouts in areas that used to be under Russian military control.
Turkey, a U.S. treaty ally, and Israel, a close friend that receives extensive U.S. military aid, have joined the fray.
The Israeli army, which had already taken the Golan Heights from Syria in 1967, seized another 155 square miles of Syrian territory along the border. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for the deployment of a “temporary defensive position until a suitable arrangement is found” in an English-language video, but left that phrase out of the Hebrew-language announcement. Israeli fighter jets have also been bombing military equipment across Syria to keep it out of “the hands of extremists.”
Turkey, meanwhile, immediately attacked the town of Manbij, near the Tur
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