What would happen If the US pulled out of Syria?

The American people learned the hard way that foreign interventions can turn out poorly. Conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, and have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.

But, as President Barack Obama realised after he withdrew U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011, just because one opposed an initial intervention does not make it easy to withdraw troops at the perceived end of a war.

Last month, U.S. President Donald Trump said he wanted a withdrawal of 2,000 American soldiers from Syria “soon”. He walked back some of that plan, under pressure from his own commanders, but indications remain that Trump would like to see a US drawdown as soon as possible.

In the years following the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, elements loyal to al Qaeda were able to increase their control over portions of Iraq. By 2012 and 2013, as the Syrian President Bashar Assad lost control over large parts of Syria, those hardline Islamic militants saw an opportunity and crossed the border. Ultimately, many of these elements went on to form Islamic State (ISIS).

Placing all the blame on Obama’s decision to withdraw troops from Iraq is a vast over-simplification , but clearly the U.S. withdrawal relieved pressure on Iraq’s radical elements and gave them the space they needed to reassert control.

Since 2014, U.S. troops have been back in Iraq to fight ISIS. In the last few months, as ISIS has suffered significant military defeats, the United States has once again begun to withdraw troops from the Iraqi theatre, and once again there are signs that ISIS insurgents have used that opportunity to expand their influence. The pattern is already repeating, and it has started even before the US withdrawal from Syria has begun.

But the fight against ISIS is not the only war being waged in Syria. A U.S. withdrawal could have significant geopolitical and regional consequences.

The sectarian power struggle between Sunnis and Shia has now become a multi-front proxy war between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran. What the Trump administration has proposed - creating a coalition of Arab (Sunni) partners to fill the hole that the United States will leave as it withdraws from Syria - will only exacerbate that proxy war.

As Michael Weiss, national security analyst at CNN and author of the New York Times best-seller, “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror ” points out in his latest article for The Daily Beast, not only will that make sectarianism worse, it is highly unlikely that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, or Qatar would participate in such an operation if the United States withdraws.

Phillip Smyth, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who focuses on Shia militias and Iranian-controlled proxy groups, told Ahval that Iran and Russia would benefit from a U.S. withdrawal, but the group that has the most to gain is perhaps Lebanon’s Hezbollah, a Shia group closely tied to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Smyth said an open conflict between the United States and the pro-Assad coalition of Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah would play into the hardline Shia narrative, bolstered by the ineffectual U.S. airstrikes against Assad, that the United States is an existential threat.

“Hezbollah and its sister forces spread through Syria and Iraq would love to turn the conflict in Syria into one where they are ‘resisting an occupier’. The U.S. is Iran's primary ideological and geopolitical foe and the ability to launch a conflict (even if it is small scale) and then claim victory against America (when it eventually withdraws) would also greatly benefit Tehran and the narratives they push.”

The most imminent threat to regional security, however, is in northern Syria, where another conflict is playing out between Turkey and the Kurdish groups known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

It has been obvious to many observers from the start that the SDF is a thinly veiled front for the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which is closely tied to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), an insurgent group fighting against the Turkish state forces for more than three decades. Despite the fact that even the United States considers the PKK to be a terrorist force and one of the primary enemies to Turkey, a NATO ally, the United States has backed the SDF in its efforts to wrest control of northern Syria from ISIS, against the protestations of both the Syrian government and Turkey.

In August 2016, Turkey intervened in Syria, ostensibly in order to fight terrorism. The reality, however, is that as ISIS collapsed the SDF, the pro-Assad coalition, and Turkey were in a race to capture as much territory in northern Syria as they could. U.S.-backed SDF commandos and Turkish forces have threatened each other several times in the last year-and-a-half, particularly near Manbij, illustrating the folly of the United States policy of backing the enemy of a key NATO ally in order to fight another enemy. If the United States were to withdraw its troops from Syria this delicate balance would likely collapse and a fight between the Turks and the SDF is perhaps inevitable.

Michael Weiss told Ahval that if this were to happen, the most likely scenario would be that the SDF would turn to the Assad regime for protection against Turkey, leaving Turkey in an increasingly adversarial relationship with Russia, Iran, and Assad. And if the SDF turns to the Syrian government for protection from the Turks, Weiss warned that the real consequences of this U.S. policy would be to turn liberated parts of Syria back over to the murderous Assad regime. “If we leave we will have liberated ISIS controlled territory on behalf of Assad, Iran and Hezbollah,” he said.

The problems with this are obvious, especially since the United States is simultaneously backing anti-Shia proxies in both Syria and Yemen.

Turkey, Weiss warned, cannot afford or win a fight against the pro-Assad coalition, so it will likely strike a balancing act of moving closer to Russia, and by extension further from NATO and the United States, while fighting against the SDF, perhaps opening yet another front for the increasingly complicated proxy war already taking place. Furthermore, the NATO alliance is already weakened by illiberal strongmen in states like Hungary, and in Turkey itself. The U.S. Syria policy is only weakening the alliance further.

Weiss stressed that not only is the United States in denial about the problematic nature of U.S. support for the SDF, the Trump administration has not addressed any of these potential problems in its discussion of a U.S. withdrawal.

“No single U.S. government official will say that the SDF or the YPG are the PKK. This is one of the reasons that the Turks hate us and are being driven into the arms of the Russians. Not only have we created this monster that has antagonised our NATO ally, but now we’re just going to leave,” he said.

The U.S., then, is in a no-win situation that is at least partially the consequences of its own policies.

Withdrawing from Syria may trigger circumstances that further damage an already strained relationship with Turkey. The status quo, however, is both unacceptable and strains US-Turkish relations.

At this point, there may be few good options for resolving this dilemma, but there may be many options for mitigating the damage and repairing the relationships with Turkey and other Gulf allies. U.S. officials, however, in two administrations in a row, have instead ignored many aspects of this complicated crisis, often for domestic political reasons. From the start of the crisis in 2011, U.S. Syria policy has had more to do with poll numbers than an understanding of the conflict, and the results speak for themselves.