Bolton: Dermer said Trump’s Syria withdrawal - ‘worst day’ of Trump admin

https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/bolton-dermer-said-trumps-syria-withdrawal-worst-day-of-trump-admin-632262

Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer told John Bolton that the sudden decision by US President Donald Trump in December 2018 to withdraw from Syria was the “worst day he had experienced thus far in the Trump administration.” Threatened and enticed by Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan into leaving Syria, the Trump administration ignored concerns by allies in the Middle East and Europe, according to the former National Security Advisor’s account.

 The Trump decision to withdraw from Syria caught almost everyone by surprise in December 2018. The war on ISIS was going well and US partners in eastern Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces, made up of Kurdish, Arab and Christian fighters, were stabilizing the areas liberated from ISIS. Turkey’s threats to invade would overturn everything the US had accomplished. There were other concerns. The US maintained a base at Al-Tanf in Syria near the Jordanian border. This base helped keep the Syrian conflict from harming Jordan. Bolton wanted to confront Iran and saw the US presence in Syria as part of the “big picture” of stopping Iran. He writes that if the US abandoned the Kurds in eastern Syria then former US partners would have to “ally with Assad against Turkey” or be ethnically cleansed as Turkey had already done to Kurds in Afrin after a January 2018 invasion. Bolton understood that eastern Syria was a huge piece of leverage against the Assad regime, where Turkey’s main interest in Syria wasn’t confronting Iran or ISIS, but fighting Kurds.