Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Donald J. Trump held an impromptu press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Monday. In the course of his remarks, he said a couple of things about the Middle East, Informed Comment’s beat. Since he’ll be back in the White House in about a month, these observations give some clue as to his thinking.
I will present a commentary on his observations about Syria:
Mr. President. . . With 900 troops in Syria, are you planning to withdraw when you leave office?
Trump: “We had 5,000 troops along the border, and I asked a couple of generals: So, we have an army of 250,000 in Syria, and you had an army of 400,000 — they have many more people than that. Turkey is a major force, by the way. And Erdogan — he’s somebody I got along with great — has a major military force. His military has not been worn out with war. It hasn’t been exhausted like others. He’s built a very strong and powerful army.
I am not sure, but I think Mr. Trump is saying that the former government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria had had 400,000 men in the Syrian Arab Army before the Arab Spring revolts of 2011, but that the numbers declined to 250,000 with desertions thereafter. My own guess is that when Trump was in office the numbers of Syrian troops had declined to more like 100,000.
I think he is recalling that he thought the 5,000 U.S. troops, which were there to coordinate the Kurdish and Arab militias of the Syrian Democratic Forces in fighting ISIL (ISIS, Daesh), were not necessary because Syria’s own 250,000 troops should have been able to handle ISIL.
If that is what he thought, it is incorrect. The Baath government of al-Assad relinquished the eastern Raqqa Province to ISIL and used its remaining troops to dominate the west of the country, what the French colonialists had called “Useful Syria” (la Syrie utile ). It had been the 5,000 US troops and the fighters of the SDF, mainly drawn from the leftist Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in the northeast, who took Raqqa and defeated ISIL on October 17, 2017. That was on Trump’s watch. Perhaps he meant to say that by October, 2019, two years later, he felt that the US troop presence was no longer necessary to ensure that there wasn’t a resurgence of ISIL.
He is right about the Turkish army. which Global Fire Power ranks as eighth in the world. Turkey, a country a little more populous than Germany, has some 355,000 active duty military personnel and a similar number of reservists. It has 205 fighter jets and 111 attack helicopters. It has over 2,000 tanks and 1,700 or so big pulled artillery pieces. It is ranked above both Italy and France.
Trump: “So, we had 5,000 soldiers between a 5-million-person army and a 250,000-person army. I asked the general, ‘What do you think of that situation?’ He said, ‘They’ll be wiped out immediately.’ And I moved them out because I took a lot of heat. And you know what happened? Nothing. I saved a lot of lives. Now, we have 900 troops. They put some back in, but it’s still only 900.
My guess is that Trump’s mention of a 5 million-person army is a reference to the military of the Russian Federation, which actually has 3.7 million military personnel including reservists. The 250,000-man army is likely that of Syria, though I believe it is an over-estimate for 2019. Most authorities had the Syrian Arab Army at 141,400 at that time.
However, the size of the Russian and Syrian armies was a little irrelevant, since the US special operations forces supporting the Syrian Democratic Forces were fighting the remnants of ISIL and were not in active combat against the Syrian or Russian armies. Moscow and Damascus had left Syria’s far east and its ISIL problem to the US and the Kurds. The US and Russia seem to have had excellent deconfliction mechanisms in Syria.
The major battle between US forces and Russian ones was not with the regular Russian military but with Wagner group mercenaries. It took place in February 2018, when Wagner irregulars attempted to seize oil fields that the US was using to fund the Kurds.
So there wasn’t really in my view much chance that the 5,000 US troops in Syria in October 2019 would have to take on either the Russians or the Syrian Arab Army, or that they would be crushed, since they had excellent air cover.
I’m sure, on the other hand, that Russian President Vladimir Putin very much wanted the US troop presence in Syria to end.
Trump (Flash-forwards to the present:) “At this point, one of the sides has essentially been wiped out. Nobody knows who the other side is, but I do. You know who it is? Turkey. Turkey is the one behind it. He’s a very smart guy. They’ve wanted that territory for thousands of years, and he got it. Those people that went in are controlled by Turkey, and that’s okay — it’s another way to fight.
“No, I don’t think I want our soldiers killed. I don’t think that will happen now, because one side has been decimated.”
Trump’s estimation that the HTS sweep across Syria was made possible by Turkish backing is correct. The “smart guy” here is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It is probably true that Turkiye exercises a certain amount of control over the new government. Using such proxies to dominate Syria and unseat the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party is indeed “another way to fight.”
Trump’s isolationist instincts are sometimes salutary. I can’t imagine what good it would be for the US to get involved militarily in the new Syria, and I hope he pulls out the remaining US troops at Tanf.
The only statement here with which I would quibble is the assertion that Turkiye has wanted Syria for thousands of years.
Turkiye only came into being on October 29, 1923. It was preceded by the Ottoman Empire, which defeated the Mamluks in 1516 at Marj Dabiq and conquered Syria that year. It ruled Syria until World War I, when the Arabic-speaking population allied with Britain during the war and expelled Turkish troops from Aleppo on October 25, 1918.
The Turkic Seljuks, who ruled part of what is now Turkiye along with Iran and Iraq, held part of Syria in the eleventh through thirteenth century. The Turkic peoples only came into the Middle East from East Asia in a big way with the Seljuks in the 1000s, the same period when the Norman French conquered England.
Before that, what is now Turkiye was inhabited by Armenians, peoples who spoke Iranian languages, and Greek speakers. So “Turkey” hasn’t existed for thousands of years, to want Syria all that time.
The rulers of Asia Minor, what is now Turkiye, included the Roman Empire. Augustus took Ankara in 25 BC. The Romans had already annexed Syria in 64 BC. So in that case, it was Italians based in Syria who took what is now Turkiye rather than the other way around.
The eastern Roman Empire lost Syria to Muslim forces in the 630s. The Muslim Umayyad caliphate based in Damascus attempted on several occasions to take Asia Minor away from the Byzantines or Eastern Rome, but failed. So too did the Abbasid caliphate after it.
I mean, if you want to consider “Turkey” anyone who lived in Anatolia, then I suppose there were ancient kingdoms based there that wanted Syria. The ancient Hittite kingdom in what is now Turkiye, which spoke an Indo-European language, conquered Syria on more than one occasion in the 1600s through 1400s BC. But before the Hittites, in the 2000s BC, the Hattians ruled Anatolia and they don’t seem to have been interested in Syria.
Saying that any people has wanted to do anything for thousands of years is essentialist and we historians don’t approve of that sort of language. Things change.
A reporter asked Are you concerned about more unrest in that region, or do you think it will stabilize?
Trump: “Nobody knows what the final outcome will be in the region. Nobody knows who the final victor is going to be. I believe it’s Turkey. Erdogan is very smart, and he’s very tough. Turkey did an unfriendly takeover without a lot of lives being lost. I can’t say that Assad wasn’t a butcher — what he did to children. You remember, I attacked him with 58 missiles. Unbelievable missiles coming from ships 700 miles away, and every one of them hit their target.
Mr. Trump is correct that Turkiye’s Erdogan is likely the final victor by virtue of his allies now controlling Damascus. However, the likelihood that Syria will stabilize seems to me low, given the regional rivalries, internal divisions, poverty and displacement. Also, Israel has destroyed the Syrian government weapons stock with hundreds of bombing raids in the past week, which leaves the new government with no means of fighting challengers such as a resurgent ISIL.
Mr. Trump is also correct that Bashar al-Assad was a butcher responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, for thousands of prisoners tortured to death, for striking children’s playgrounds with barrel bombs. He also did use chemical weqpons, to which Trump responded with a missile barrage in 2017.
Trump: “Obama had drawn the red line in the sand, but then he refused to honor it. Assad killed many more children after that, and Obama did nothing. But I did. I hit him with a lot of missiles. I remember the night President Xi was here; we were having chocolate cake at dinner when I explained what we were doing. Those missiles were shot, and it was amazing how precise they were —- every one hit its target.
“Had Obama enforced his red line, you wouldn’t have even had Russia there. But they are there now, and I never understood why. Russia isn’t getting much out of it. Now, their time is taken up with Ukraine, and we want that to stop too. It’s Carnage.”
I do not believe that Mr. Obama’s having declined to bomb Syria over chemical weapons use in 2013 had anything to do with the continuation of the war. Mr. Obama was refused support for this move both by the British Parliament and by the Republican-controlled Congress, and was politically forestalled from launching missiles. Those missiles would not have had any affect on the civil war. Nor did Mr. Trump’s 2017 missile barrage have any material impact on the course of the last stages of the Syrian Civil War.
Jeff: You mentioned the wars. Can you tell us what you said to Prime Minister Netanyahu in your call on Saturday? And have you spoken to President Putin since your election?
Trump: “I’m not going to comment on the Putin question, but I will comment on Netanyahu. We had a very good conversation. We discussed what’s going to happen moving forward, and I made it clear that I’ll be very available starting January 20th.
“As you know, I’ve warned that if the hostages are not back home by that date, all hell is going to break out—very strongly.
“Beyond that, it was mostly a recap call. I asked him about the current situation and where things stand. Mike Waltz, by the way, is doing a fantastic job. Everyone is very happy with him, and he was very involved in the call as well. . . “
Let’s hope the remaining Israeli hostages are indeed returned within a month. However, all hell broke loose in Gaza a year ago and has been ongoing and it is difficult to see what more Trump could do to Gaza short of killing off the remaining 2 million people entirely.
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Video:
PBS NewsHour: “WATCH LIVE: Trump speaks to reporters at Mar-a-Lago”
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