Let Them Fight: The Case for Leaving Syria

“If the United States and its NATO allies consider Turkey to be a partner worth keeping—and both the size of its military and its contributions to NATO’s budget suggest that it is—then a situation placing Turkey in conflict with Russia is to their benefit.”

The time has come for the United States to withdraw from Syria. Participation in the conflict has long since passed being of any strategic value for Washington, given President Bashar al-Assad’s pyrrhic military victory and the territorial defeat of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in March of 2019. The United States lost its leverage to support a diplomatic resolution to the conflict when Turkey’s October 2019 military intervention catalyzed an American withdrawal from all but a narrow strip of land containing the country’s oilfields known as the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES). The United States’ decision to arm the Syrian Kurds, who comprised about 10% of the pre-war Syrian population, has alienated the country’s majority Sunni Arab populace and temporarily brought together longtime historical foes Russia, Iran, and Turkey. The approximately 900 remaining American soldiers are increasingly vulnerable, surrounded by hostile Iranian proxy fighters to the west, south, and east across the border in Iraq and to the north by Turkish mercenaries who engage in near-daily artillery exchanges with the United States’ Kurdish allies: the People’s Protection Units (YPG). Leaving Syria will not only save American lives but also place American adversaries in a quandary by removing the common enemy of the Syrian Conflict.

A Mission Run Amok

The tacit American policy in Syria since the territorial defeat of ISIL in March of 2019 has been to create a Kurdish state in northeastern Syria to act as a bulwark against any future Salafi jihadist organizations and to interdict weapons shipments from Iran to Lebanon and southeastern Syria for use against Israel. The failures of this approach are multiple. For one, ISIL has endured in Syria in the form of the al-Hawl refugee camp protected by American and YPG forces. Inside, some 62,000 people—mostly wives and children of former fighters—have organized to indoctrinate inmates and govern the camp in a manner that is preserving ISIL’s extremist views. Intermittent YPG raids into the camp have not managed to dislodge ISIL control of the prisoner population, and the United States has been unable to respond due to both domestic and foreign legal constraints on its behavior toward captured foreign fighters.

Furthermore, Washington’s hopes for a Syrian Kurdish state have been frustrated by the YPG’s inadequate attempts at governance. Famine, drought, and an energy shortage, though prevalent across Syria, have been acute in YPG-administered areas. The legislative council that governs YPG-held areas failed to implement measures to address these problems in 2021, citing budgetary issues. Riots against YPG management are routine in the Arab-majority regions of the AANES. Syrian Arabs are already woefully underrepresented in local councils and the security services and the YPG has imitated President Assad’s oppressive tactics to silence dissidents. Finally, the American goal of blocking Iranian weapon shipments transiting Syria has failed. Indeed, the southern bank of the Euphrates River is bristling with Iranian munitions. Iranian proxies have used these weapons for strikes both on American forces and on Israel.