Trump Speaks on Syria After Major Shakeup in Conflict - War Hawks Will Hate This
President-elect Donald Trump said Saturday that the U.S. military should stay out of the fast-escalating conflict in Syria, where a dramatic rebel offensive reached the capital and threatened the rule of Syria’s Russian- and Iranian-allied president. “THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT,” Trump declared on social media.
As world leaders watched the rebel advance, with its potential to alter the balance of power in the Middle East, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser separately stressed that the Biden administration had no intention of intervening.
“The United States is not going to … militarily dive into the middle of a Syrian civil war,” Jake Sullivan said.
Sullivan said the U.S. would keep acting as necessary to keep the Islamic State — a violently anti-Western extremist group not known to be involved in the offensive but with sleeper cells in Syria’s deserts — from exploiting openings presented by the fighting.
After the rebels took control of Damascus, the head of a Syrian opposition war monitor said early Sunday that Assad left the country for an undisclosed location.
Trump’s comments on the dramatic rebel push were his first since Syrian rebels launched their advance late last month. They came while he was in Paris for the reopening of the Notre Dame cathedral.
In his post, Trump said Assad did not deserve U.S. support to stay in power.
Assad’s government has been propped up by the Russian and Iranian military, along with Hezbollah and other Iranian-allied militias, in a now 13-year-old war against opposition groups seeking his overthrow. The war, which began as a mostly peaceful uprising in 2011 against the Assad family’s rule, has killed a half-million people, fractured Syria and drawn in a more than a half-dozen foreign militaries and militias. The U.S. early on closed its embassy in Syria and imposed sanctions over the brutality of Assad’s conduct of the war.
The insurgents are led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which the U.S. has designated as a terrorist group and says had links to al-Qaida, although the group has since broken ties with al-Qaida.
The U.S. has about 900 troops in Syria, including U.S. forces working with Kurdish allies in the opposition-held northeast to prevent any resurgence of the Islamic State group.
Gen. Bryan Fenton, head of U.S. Special Operations Command, said he would not want to speculate on how the upheaval in Syria would affect the U.S. military’s footprint in the country. “It’s still too early to tell,” he said.
Syrian opposition activists and regional officials have been watching closely for any indication from the incoming Trump administration on how the U.S. would respond to the rebel advances against Assad.
In his post, Trump said Russia “is so tied up in Ukraine” that it “seems incapable of stopping this literal march through Syria, a country they have protected for years.” He said rebels could possibly force Assad from power.
The president-elect condemned the overall U.S. handling of the war but said the routing of Assad and Russian forces might be for the best.
“Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” he wrote in Saturday’s post.
An influential Syrian opposition activist in Washington, Mouaz Moustafa, interrupted a briefing to reporters to read Trump’s post and appeared to choke up. He said Trump’s declaration that the U.S. should stay out of the fight was the best outcome that the the Syrians aligned against Assad could hope for.
Rebels have been freeing political detainees of the Assad government from government prisons as they advance across Syria. Moustafa pledged to reporters Saturday that opposition forces would be alert for any U.S. detainees among them and do their best to protect them.
Moustafa said that includes Austin Tice, an American journalist missing for more than a decade and suspected to be held by Assad.
The Western Journal has reviewed this Associated Press story and may have altered it prior to publication to ensure that it meets our editorial standards.
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