The fall of the Assad regime in Syria will not impact U.S. support, at least for now, for one of Washington’s most steadfast allies in the fight against the Islamic State terror group, according to senior American officials.
Speaking just hours after Russian officials confirmed former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had fled Damascus and taken refuge in Moscow, and a day after rebel forces entered the Syrian capital, U.S. officials insisted there are no plans to alter the U.S. military footprint in Syria, which includes some 900 troops, most of them working in the country’s northeast with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces or SDF.
Maintaining U.S. positions across eastern Syria “is something we will continue to do,” a senior U.S. administration official said Sunday, briefing reporters on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss sensitive information.
“We think that presence is critically important for the stability of those areas and for denying the efforts of ISIS to resurge, and also for the integrity of the SDF and the groups that we work with in the East to maintain stability out there,” the official said, using an acronym for the Islamic State group, also known as IS or Daesh.
The SDF, an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias formed in 2015, mustering a force of 30,000 to 40,000 fighters that played a key role in eroding IS’s hold on large swaths of territory, including the terror group’s self-proclaimed Syrian capital of Raqqa.
