James Jeffry admits misleading senior US leaders about actual number of American troops in Syria

The outgoing US Special Envoy for Syria James Jeffry has acknowledged that his team routinely misled senior US officials about the actual number of the US occupation troops in Syria.

 “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey, who has recently resigned from his post, said in a recent interview with the American “Defense One” news website. The actual number of troops in the northeast of Syria is “a lot more than” the roughly two hundred troops Trump initially agreed to leave there in 2019, he added.

 Jeffrey revealed that, with the help of American officials, he managed to dissuade Trump from fulfilling his promise to withdraw his occupying forces from Syria. Jeffrey described this incident as a “success story that ended with the American forces still operating in Syria.”

He said that Trump was inclined to pull out. Thus “we decided to come up with five better arguments for why we needed to stay and we succeeded.”

In December 2018, Trump announced his intention to withdraw American forces from Syria. He repeated his declaration in 2019, acknowledging that the US military presence in Syria  is “costly and it benefits other countries the more.” However, Trump didn’t keep his promises, and it appears that the misinformation and arguments invented by Jeffrey and other officials are to be blamed.

In another context, Jeffrey pointed out that Trump’s administration has looked at the Middle East through a geostrategic lens and kept its focus on Iran, Russia, and China, while keeping the metastatic “disease” of terrorism in check.

Hamda Mustafa