The US envoy to the global coalition fighting the Islamic State (IS) group has resigned in protest over President Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw US troops from Syria.
Brett McGurk, who described Trump’s decision as a “shock”, joins Defence Secretary Jim Mattis in an administration exodus of experienced national security figures.
Only 11 days ago, Mr McGurk said it would be “reckless” to consider IS defeated and therefore would be unwise to bring American forces home.
The 45-year-old has decided to speed up his original plan to leave the post in mid-February.
In an email to his staff, he said: “The recent decision by the president came as a shock and was a complete reversal of policy.
“It left our coalition partners confused and our fighting partners bewildered with no plan in place or even considered thought as to consequences.”
Mr Trump’s announcement of the withdrawal “left our coalition partners confused and our fighting partners bewildered with no plan in place or even considered thought as to consequences”, the email went on.
Appointed to the post by President Barack Obama in 2015 and retained by Mr Trump, Mr McGurk said in his resignation letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo the militants were on the run, but not yet defeated, and the premature pullout of US forces from Syria would create the conditions that gave rise to IS.
Brett McGurk, who I do not know, was appointed by President Obama in 2015. Was supposed to leave in February but he just resigned prior to leaving. Grandstander? The Fake News is making such a big deal about this nothing event!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 23, 2018
Mr Trump played down the development, tweeting Saturday night that “I do not know” the envoy and it’s a “nothing event”.
He noted Mr McGurk planned to leave soon anyway and added: “Grandstander?”
Shortly after news of the resignation broke, Mr Trump again defended his decision to pull all of the roughly 2,000 US forces from Syria in the coming weeks.
“We were originally going to be there for three months, and that was seven years ago – we never left,” Mr Trump tweeted.
“When I became President, ISIS was going wild. Now ISIS is largely defeated and other local countries, including Turkey, should be able to easily take care of whatever remains. We’re coming home!”
Although the civil war in Syria has gone on since 2011, the US did not begin launching airstrikes against IS until September 2014, and American troops did not go into Syria until 2015.
Mr McGurk, whose resignation is effective from December 31, was planning to leave the job in mid-February after a US-hosted meeting of foreign ministers from the coalition countries, but felt he could continue no longer after Mr Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria and Mr Mattis’ resignation.
Mr McGurk also said in the email: “I worked this week to help manage some of the fallout, but — as many of you heard in my many meetings and phone calls — I ultimately concluded that I could not carry out these new instructions and maintain my integrity at the same time.”
Mr Trump’s declaration of a victory over IS has been roundly contradicted by his own experts’ assessments, and his decision to pull troops out was widely denounced by members of Congress, who called his action rash.
Mr Mattis, perhaps the most respected foreign policy official in the administration, announced on Thursday that he will leave by the end of February.
He told Trump in a letter he was departing because “you have a right to have a Secretary of Defence whose views are better aligned with yours”.
US policy has been to keep troops in place until the extremists are eradicated.
Among officials’ key concerns is that a US pullout will leave US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces vulnerable to attacks by Turkey, the Syrian government and remaining IS fighters.
The SDF, a Kurdish-led force, is America’s only military partner in Syria.
Mr McGurk said at a State Department briefing on December 11 that “it would be reckless if we were just to say, ‘Well, the physical caliphate is defeated, so we can just leave now’”.
He previously served as a deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq and Iran. During the negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal by the Obama administration, he led secret side talks with Tehran on the release of Americans imprisoned there.
Mr McGurk was briefly considered for the post of ambassador to Iraq after having served as a senior official covering Iraq and Afghanistan during President George W. Bush’s administration.
A former Supreme Court law clerk to the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Mr McGurk worked as a lawyer for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq after the 2003 US-led invasion and joined Mr Bush’s National Security Council staff, where in 2007 and 2008, he was the lead US negotiator on security agreements with Iraq.
Taking over for now for Mr McGurk will be his deputy, retired Lieutenant general Terry Wolff, who served three tours of active duty in Iraq.
IS militants still hold a string of villages and towns along the Euphrates River in eastern Syria, where they have resisted weeks of attacks by the US-supported Syrian Democratic Forces to drive them out.
The pocket is home to about 15,000 people, among them 2,000 IS fighters, according to US military estimates.
But that figure could be as high as 8,000 militants, if fighters hiding out in the deserts south of the Euphrates River are also counted, according to according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict through networks of local informants.
