The Revived ISIS Threat Challenges Trump’s Instincts on Syria

By Noah Rothman

Friday, January 03, 2025

 

“Syria is a mess but is not our friend,” Donald Trump declared in mid-December as the 13-year-long Syrian civil war culminated in the shockingly swift collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s Baathist regime.

 

“This is not our fight,” Trump continued. “Let it play out. Do not get involved.”

 

The Pentagon and America’s allies abroad don’t seem to agree. Following the implosion of the Assad regime and the withdrawal of Russian air support over the territories it controlled, the United States executed dozens of airstrikes on Islamic State targets that were being sheltered by America’s enemies. The United States joined Israel in executing attacks on “Iran-aligned targets” and nonconventional weapons facilities inside Syria, too. Last week, the French engaged in the air campaign over Syria, designed to prevent the Islamic State from regaining a foothold in Syria’s ungoverned redoubts.

 

Preventing ISIS’s resurgence in the Middle East has taken on new urgency following a mass-casualty attack in New Orleans by an ISIS-inspired terrorist. Ahead of that attack, the Biden administration’s point person on ISIS warned that the group has secured a foothold in Afghanistan and sub-Saharan Africa, where about “60% of ISIS propaganda comes from.” Starving these affiliates of the inspiration and material support they enjoy from the heart of what was once their nascent caliphate is a strategic priority.

 

Recent events have scrambled the calculations to which some of America’s partners in the Middle East had previously committed themselves. “Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed al-Sudani said last week Islamic State had recently seized a large quantity of weapons belonging to the Syrian army, which it could use to expand in the region,” the Wall Street Journal reported this week. In recognition of the deteriorating security situation in his neighborhood, the Iraqi PM signaled his willingness to “to reassess a recently concluded withdrawal agreement that called for nearly all U.S. forces to leave [Iraq] within two years.”

 

Indeed, the roughly 4,500 U.S. soldiers on the ground in Iraq and eastern Syria are auspiciously positioned to influence regional developments at a time of profound dynamism, but Trump and the most vocal members of the MAGA movement have a dim view of those commitments. Prior to Assad’s ouster, some observers expected Trump to execute a withdrawal of U.S. forces from the oil-rich regions of eastern Syria where they are stationed — an operation he tried but failed to complete during his first term. Now, however, the value of the U.S. presence in both Syria and Iraq should be obvious to American policymakers.

 

Late last month, the commander of the primarily Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), General Mazloum Abdi, warned that Islamic State militants will attempt to liberate the tens of thousands of ISIS prisoners in their custody. So far, international diplomatic efforts have helped to preserve an anxious peace between the SDF and the militant groups backed by Turkey. Ankara will not allow an autonomous Kurdish political entity to take root, and foreign observers fear that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will loosen the reins on Turkey’s proxies in Syria if that outcome appears imminent. That clash, should it occur, would provide fertile ground for Islamic State militants to revive the caliphate.

 

“It is in our national security interests that we help the Kurds who destroyed the caliphate on our behalf,” Senator Lindsey Graham said last month. “If chaos in the region leads to an ISIS prison jailbreak, it would be a nightmare for America,” he added. “The caliphate carried out and inspired some of the worst terrorist attacks the world has ever seen. We cannot allow ISIS to return.”

 

In this period of flux, the United States would not be well served by unilaterally sacrificing the leverage it currently possesses over the region’s actors. Retreating from the region and hoping for the best is not a strategy. That is, however, the approach many of Trump’s most performatively loyal advisers’ advocate.

 

American voters have no appetite for a large deployment of U.S. troops to the Middle East, and that is precisely what America’s relatively small footprint is designed to prevent. Trump will have to weigh his instincts against U.S. interests in the region and the sad fate that befalls America’s allies when we abandon them, as we too often do.