Trump loses US envoy to anti-IS coalition over Syria plan

The letter was submitted Friday and described to the AP on Saturday by an official familiar with its contents. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly before the letter was released and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Trump played down the development, tweeting Saturday night that “I do not know” the envoy and it’s a “nothing event.” He noted McGurk planned to leave soon anyway and added: “Grandstander?”

“I have no idea who that person is. Never heard of him … until yesterday,” Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.

Shortly after news of McGurk’s resignation broke, Trump again defended his decision to pull all of the roughly 2,000 U.S. 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,” 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 U.S. did not begin launching airstrikes against IS until September 2014, and American troops did not go into Syria until 2015.

McGurk, whose resignation is effective Dec. 31, was planning to leave the job in mid-February after a U.S.-hosted meeting of foreign ministers from the coalition countries, but he felt he could continue no longer after Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria and Mattis’ resignation.

In his email to his staff, McGurk said: “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.”

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.

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 that he was departing because “you have a right to have a Secretary of Defence whose views are better aligned with yours.”

The withdrawal decision will fulfil Trump’s goal of bringing troops home from Syria, but military leaders have pushed back for months, arguing that the IS group remains a threat and could regroup in Syria’s long-running civil war. U.S. policy has been to keep troops in place until the extremists are eradicated.

Among officials’ key concerns is that a U.S. pullout will leave U.S.-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

McGurk said at a State Department briefing on Dec. 11 that “it would be reckless if we were just to say, ‘Well, the physical caliphate is defeated, so we can just leave now.’”

McGurk, 45, 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.

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, McGurk worked as a lawyer for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and joined Bush’s National Security Council staff, where in 2007 and 2008, he was the lead U.S. negotiator on security agreements with Iraq.

Taking over for now for McGurk will be his deputy, retired Lt. Gen. 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 U.S.-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 U.S. 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.

Matthew Lee And Susannah George, The Associated Press

by Canadian Press

Trump loses US envoy to anti-IS coalition over Syria plan

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