The weekend’s ISIS attack came as the Trump administration is trying to expand the U.S. presence in Syria.
President Donald Trump declared in his first term that the Islamic State group was defeated and that U.S. troops would leave Syria. This weekend, a gunman linked to the Islamic State group killed two Iowa National Guardsmen and an American translator in Syria.
Syrian and U.S. troops were returning from a joint patrol on Saturday when a shooter attacked them at the gate of a military base in Palmyra, a former stronghold of the Islamic State group. U.S. Central Command described the attacker, who Syrian forces killed, as a «lone ISIS gunman.» Trump wrote on social media that the shooting was an attack on America and Syria alike, vowing revenge.
Those statements airbrushed a disturbing fact: The gunman himself was a member of the Syrian armed forces. A Syrian government spokesman, Nour al-Din al-Baba, said in a TV interview that the shooter was already facing an investigation for «extremist» views before the attack. The authorities were scheduled to make a decision on his case at the beginning of this week.
According to al-Baba, the Syrian authorities are now trying to determine whether he was an actual Islamic State member or merely a sympathizer. Agence France Presse reports that 11 other members of the Syrian security forces were taken in for questioning after the attack.
In other words, the attack in Palmyra was the first overseas «green-on-blue» incident—a betrayal by an allied soldier—since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. And like the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. military campaign in Syria has been dragging on without a clear purpose.
U.S. troops entered Syria to fight the Islamic State group, which lost its last territory in 2018.
