President Donald Trump appears to be pivoting U.S. strategy in Syria to countering the Islamic Republic of Iran, The Wall Street Journal reports.
U.S. strategy before now was solely focused on defeating the Islamic State, an aim with which it deployed nearly 2,000 U.S. special operations forces to the country to support locally backed forces in the assault. ISIS, however, has now nearly totally collapsed, and these forces are likely to remain in Syria to deny Iranian-backed militias access to strategic land.
“Our leadership has set as an objective not to allow Iran and its proxies to be able to establish a presence in Syria that they can use to threaten our allies or us in the region,” a U.S. defense official declared to TheWSJ. Iran has tens of thousands of militia members inside Syria to support President Bashar Al-Assad.
Assad is unlikely to go anywhere. His military, with Iranian and Russian support, has effectively won the Syrian Civil War. Rebel resistance remains in pockets and likely will for some time, but his position is not in realistic jeopardy. Trump is reportedly prepared to accept his reign in Syria until 2021.
U.S. policymakers fear Iran can use its new control of territory in Syria to bolster its support for terrorists in Lebanon. Iran is also substantially involved in the ongoing conflict in Iraq, where experts fear it is trying to establish a reliable land bridge that stretches to Lebanon. Such a land bridge across “would provide a larger platform for projecting power and establishing an uninterrupted Iranian presence in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon,” Hanin Ghaddar of the Washington Institute noted in November 2016.
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