Syria panel calls for Trump to halt pullout

A congressionally appointed panel is calling on the Donald Trump administration to halt the US military withdrawal from Syria as part of a set of comprehensive changes to salvage the four-year US campaign to defeat the Islamic State in the war-torn country.

Created after Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H. tucked the review into an aviation funding bill nearly a year ago, the bipartisan Syria Study Group’s final report makes an effort to keep the US military mission narrowly focused on defeating IS while reaching deals with Russia toward a political settlement of the four-year war and Turkey to preserve the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.

While the call to reverse the pullout coming from a range of Washington foreign policy experts would stand at odds with Trump’s long-standing desire to get US troops out of Syria, members of the panel made the case that America’s military role there is far less costly than long-standing fights in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We try very clearly in the report to articulate how the US military presence in Syria is not in the category of forever wars,” said Dana Stroul, a co-chair of the group and a former staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “This is a military mission that’s not resource intensive like Iraq and Afghanistan and we should continue to maintain it.”