President Trump has vowed that the Saturday attack — carried out by a lone ISIS group shooter that reportedly infiltrated local security forces, killing two Iowa National Guard members and an American interpreter — will be met with "very serious" retaliation.
Trump and first lady Melania Trump on Wednesday participated in a dignified transfer ceremony of the remains of Sgt. Edgar Brian Torres-Tovar, 25, of Des Moines, and Sgt. William Nathaniel Howard, 29, of Marshalltown, at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
The interpreter was identified Tuesday as U.S. civilian Ayad Mansoor Sakat of Macomb, Mich. Three other members of the Iowa National Guard were hurt in the attack, but the Pentagon has not identified them.
While airstrikes seem a likely response to the attack, it's unclear if the move will have its intended effect, according to Rosemary Kelanic, the director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities.
"It's pretty hard to retaliate against a terrorist group that doesn't exist anymore," she told The Hill. "There's a lone-wolf gunman who claimed an affiliation with ISIS who carried out this heinous attack, but ISIS as a territorial caliphate has been gone for over five years."
The U.S. has roughly 1,000 troops in Syria to prevent a resurgence of ISIS after it was defeated in 2019. The service members are split between outposts in northeast Syria and at Al-Tanf base in the southeast, and their numbers have already been halved since April.
The Pentagon at the time framed the drawdown as a "consolidation" that reflects the changing security environment in the country, even as the Biden administration in December said it had raised the number of troops in Syria from 900 to 2,000 to help with threats from ISIS and Iranian-backed militias in the region.
Kelanic predicted airstrikes or commando raids will be Trump's most likely response, similar to what Washington has done "over the past couple of years every so often, where the U.S. goes in and claims that they killed a number of ISIS militants. … I don't expect that it will be anything more than that, because there just isn't anything to target that's left besides these sort of isolated pockets of people that could be sympathetic."
Colin Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst at global intelligence and security firm the Soufan Group, said the incident may prompt Trump to pull all troops from the war-torn country, something he has sought to do in the past. The president in October 2019, during his first term, ordered a withdrawal of some 1,000 American forces from northern Syria after he declared ISIS defeated in the country.
"The attack will certainly give those who are in Trump's inner circle, and who have been agitating for a full-scale U.S. troop withdrawal, more fodder to make their case," Clarke said.
Trump, for the time being, appears to want to keep troops in the country. Earlier this week, he defended the decision, saying service members are there as "we're trying to make sure that there's going to be … peace in the Middle East, and Syria is a big part of it."
In the interim, Clarke predicted the U.S. might launch a drone strike targeting ISIS command and control nodes in Syria, but he said there was unlikely to be any special operation raids that endanger more U.S. personnel.
Read the full report at thehill.com.
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