“I think ISIS fighters would enter back into the mainstream” if US forces leave Syria,” Austin told the Associated Press at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. “I think that we still have work to do in terms of keeping a foot on the throat of ISIS.”
The US has recently upped its presence of troops in Syria from 900 to around 2,000 after a coalition of rebels led by the Islamist Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) ousted Bashar al-Assad’s regime on December 8.
It has explained the surge in numbers as a temporary measure to prevent ISIS from gaining a foothold in the country.
“At some point, the SDF may very well be absorbed into the Syrian military and then Syria would own all the [ISIS detention] camps and hopefully keep control of them,” Austin said, calling the Kurdish-led force “good partners.”
US forces in Syria are the primary backers of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which territorially defeated ISIS in 2019 and ended a five-year so-called “caliphate” of the group, two years after they were defeated in neighboring Iraq.
But attacks by Turkey and Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) militia groups are threatening Kurdish-held territories in the north, forcing them to scale back anti-ISIS operations to redeploy on the northern frontlines.
Turkey considers the People’s Protection Units (YPG) – the backbone of the SDF – as the Syrian front for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a designated terrorist group by Ankara.
On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken stressed the importance of maintaining control of “the terrorist threat, the enduring terrorist threat caused by ISIS.”
“An even more acute danger would be if the more than 10,000 foreign terrorist fighters who are being detained under the vigilance of our Kurdish friends in Syria were to get out and reconstitute,” Blinken warned.
