US military pulls out of Syria’s Al-Tanf garrison in major shift

WASHINGTON — US troops have completed their withdrawal from the strategic Al-Tanf garrison on Syria’s southern desert border with Jordan and Iraq amid a broader US military drawdown from the country.

The contingent of US soldiers previously stationed at Al-Tanf has relocated to Jordan, allowing forces aligned with the government in Damascus to take over the key crossing as part of a handover of American military bases across Syria’s northeast.

A US official confirmed to Al-Monitor that the US contingent at Al-Tanf had completely withdrawn by Wednesday. The handover of the base was facilitated by the self-styled Syrian Free Army, a militia previously trained by US troops at the site but now aligned with the government in Damascus, the official said.

Syria’s Defense Ministry confirmed that it had taken control of Al-Tanf in a statement released early on Thursday.

Why it matters: The US military’s departure from Al-Tanf closes a chapter in the Pentagon’s decade-long campaign against the Islamic State group.

US forces kicked off a high-stakes mission to evacuate some 7,000 core ISIS detainees from prisons in Syria to Iraq last month amid a Damascus offensive against Kurdish-led militias previously backed by the Pentagon, as the Trump administration pivots its support to Syria's new Islamist-led government.

The airlift is "near complete," the US official told Al-Monitor. “We have made significant progress in both degrading ISIS and going after its remnants."

The US Air Force has ramped up intermittent strikes on suspected ISIS locations throughout the country amid the ongoing troop drawdown in recent weeks, largely with aircraft based in neighboring Jordan.

The official declined to say how many US troops had withdrawn from Al-Tanf nor how many remain in northeast Syria, but acknowledged that a complete withdrawal of American ground forces from the country was possible, depending on stability conditions on the ground. “We will remain poised to go after ISIS threats that emerge,” the official said.

Context: Situated along a remote stretch of the Baghdad-Damascus highway, the base became a symbol of the evolving US military mission in Syria long after ISIS had been largely driven out of the area.

Originally set up as a forward outpost by US special operators to disrupt ISIS transit lines between Syria and Iraq during the Obama administration, the site grew into a base of operations for the Pentagon’s clandestine training of local Syrian rebels to take on ISIS themselves. 

That project — carried out in parallel to the CIA’s similarly ill-fated Syrian rebel training program — suffered a major setback in 2016, when several hundred US-trained fighters dispatched from Al-Tanf suffered a bloody rout when they attempted to seize the border stronghold of Albukamal from ISIS.

Yet the Pentagon opted to keep Al-Tanf, repurposing the base to monitor and geographically impede the expansion of Iran’s military activity in Syria in coordination with Israel and Jordan – stretching the legal authority underpinning the US military's mission.

“What really concerns us more is Iranian power projection systems: long-range missiles, drones, radar systems, air defense capabilities — that you do not need to fight an internal civil war against a lightly armed opposition force,” the first Trump administration’s Syria envoy, James Jeffrey, told House lawmakers during a hearing in 2019.

"If they can be allowed to embed themselves in that country with long-range systems, they would be able to open a third front on Israel next to Lebanon and Gaza," Jeffrey said.

Pentagon officials over the years regularly coordinated with Israel's top brass as Israeli fighter pilots exploited the US-controlled airspace over Al-Tanf to launch strikes in Syria on Iranian weapons shipments while chipping away at the Assad regime's air defenses.

Meanwhile, the US military’s enforcement of a buffer zone on the ground out to a 55-kilometer (34-mile) radius around the base had encouraged tens of thousands of desperate Syrians fleeing the Assad regime and ISIS to flock to the area seeking refuge.

The nearby Rukban displaced persons camp, which began as a small settlement as Jordan closed its border with Syria in 2016, swelled to more than 60,000 people at its peak.

For several years the majority of Rukban's inhabitants had no access to regular electricity, running water or permanent shelters and were forced to rely on intermittent UN food deliveries, which were often delayed or canceled under restrictions imposed by Damascus as the Assad regime sought to coerce them to return home to government-controlled areas.

Rukban’s inhabitants became the silent victims of a long-running humanitarian jurisdiction dispute as Jordan restricted water supplies in an apparent bid to discourage further settlement. The US military did not provide widespread humanitarian aid to the nearby camp until 2023 despite years of petitioning by humanitarian activists and aid groups.

By 2019, the expanded site — no longer secret — had grown into an easy target for militias backed by Iran and armed with Iranian-made drones to push back on the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Tehran.

Both the Trump and Biden administrations saw interagency debates about shuttering Al-Tanf. Jordan’s King Abdullah and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu each lobbied US President Donald Trump during his first term to keep the garrison, reportedly amid concerns that a US withdrawal could open the path to an expanded Iranian foothold.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani also privately petitioned the Biden administration to keep US troops in Syria after the overthrow of the Bashar al-Assad regime by Islamist rebels in December 2024, fearing potential spillover from across the border as former al-Qaeda affiliates took control of Damascus.

With the consolidation of interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government and the withdrawal of Iranian forces from Syria last year, however, officials in Washington deemed the site had largely outlived its purpose. Iraqi and Syrian intelligence chiefs agreed to jointly administer the site in a meeting late last year.

What’s next: Syrian military forces have moved into Al-Tanf and will take control of the nearby al-Waleed border crossing with Iraq. 

“Through coordination between the Syrian and American sides, units of the Syrian Arab Army have taken control of the Al-Tanf base, secured the base and its surroundings, and begun deploying along the Syrian-Iraqi-Jordanian border in the Al-Tanf desert,” the Defense Ministry said in a statement.

“The ministry’s border guard forces will begin assuming their duties and deploying in the area in the coming days,” the statement read.

This developing story has been updated since initial publication.