America's main man in fight against Daesh resigns in protest at troop withdrawal

The fallout from US President Donald Trump’s sudden decision last week to withdraw American troops from Syria has led to another resignation. This time it’s the country’s foremost official in the fight against Daesh, Brett McGurk.

McGurk, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama as the US special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat IS (Daesh), brought his departure forward from February. His resignation leaves Trump’s Middle East policy in further disarray.

The 45-year-old official resigned on Friday in protest following Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw the last batch of US troops, numbering 2,000, from Syria. In his resignation letter, McGurk described Trump’s decision to pull out of Syria as a shock.

“The recent decision by the president came as a shock and was a complete reversal of policy,” he said in an email to his staff viewed by Associated Press. “It left our coalition partners confused and our fighting partners bewildered with no plan in place or even considered thought as to consequences.”

Despite his position as the top US envoy in the war against Daesh, Trump snubbed McGurk by taking to twitter on Saturday saying that he does not know the envoy and it’s a “nothing event.” He noted McGurk planned to leave soon anyway and added, “Grandstander?”

Another Trump official said that even he didn’t know McGurk, who is meant to be America’s main man in Syria. “I have no idea who that person is. Never heard of him… until yesterday,” Trump’s acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.

McGurk’s resignation follows another high profile departure from the White House last week, when Secretary of Defence Jim Mattis decided to call it a day.

Critics have denounced Trump’s withdrawal as an abandonment of US interest in the region, signalling America’s retreat from the Middle East. They say it leaves a vacuum that will be exploited by Turkey as well as America’s rivals Russia and Iran.

Trump has defended his decision by insisting that that he had been given an assurance by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that the last remnants of Daesh in Syria would be cleared out by Ankara. According to a senior White House official who received a detailed readout of the phone call between the Turkish and American presidents, Erdoğan told Trump, “In fact, as your friend, I give you my word on this.”

Explaining the pull out, Trump tweeted yesterday: “I just had a long and productive call with President @RT_Erdogan of Turkey. We discussed ISIS [Daesh], our mutual involvement in Syria, & the slow & highly coordinated pull out of US troops from the area. After many years they are coming home. We also discussed heavily expanded Trade.”

Turkey has been vocal about its plans to strike US-backed Kurds in Syria, whom it describes as terrorists. The withdrawal of US troops is the strongest indication yet that an operation against the YPG, an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) — which has waged an insurgency against the state in south-eastern Turkey for 34 years — is imminent. Such an offensive will raise further concerns over the fate of over two thousand Daesh members who were captured by Kurdish fighters and are being held as prisoners.

A report by the Washington Post explained that Western governments which supported the US-led war against the militants enthusiastically are refusing to repatriate those amongst them who are their own citizens, fearing that they would spread radical ideology or perhaps carry out attacks back home. However, according to Abdulkarim Omar, who jointly heads the foreign affairs department of the self-styled Kurdish administration in north eastern Syria, the local authority does not want the responsibility of guarding and feeding so many militants and lacks the capacity to stage trials for people on charges of war crimes and other serious breaches of international law.