With respect, Simon Jenkins’ support for Donald Trump’s withdrawal of US troops from Syria is misguided (Opinion, 4 January). I was on a humanitarian mission to the region officially called the “Self-Administration Area of North-East Syria” when Trump’s middle-of-the-night tweet announcement came. While it is an inelegant name, the region’s acronym is apt: SANE Syria. The area is peaceful; the rest of the country is in chaos. SANE Syria encompasses a number of groups who, supported by the US and UK, gave 8,000 of their lives to the fight against not just Isis, but also dictatorship.

The Kurd-led autonomous zone is an island of democratic liberalism in a crescent of totalitarian and religious extremism that stretches from Turkey to Somalia. The American presence is all that has prevented the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, from destroying a project where each political office is co-chaired by a man and a woman. They could teach us a lesson in our era of #MeToo; instead Trump gives them a lesson in betrayal in exchange for 12 pieces of silver (or, in this case, $3.5bn in arms sales to Turkey).

Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad views the autonomous region as his enemy too. On the afternoon of Trump’s announcement, I was in Derik, close to the Turkish border, to meet a Syriac Christian community. They have also spilled blood. One woman, Baka Binjamin, was in the same platoon as her son Yacoub. She insisted on fighting in the first line, ahead of her child, in what must be the ultimate example of her maternal instinct. Both are miraculously still alive, but they will not survive another onslaught.

If President Trump’s tweet is followed by an American exodus, the sane part of Syria will be crushed between the anvil of Assad and Erdoğan’s hammer. Conservative Republican senator Lindsay Graham took to Twitter too, and he said that to withdraw the small US force from the region would be a “huge … mistake”. Without any casualties, it has protected human rights. One can only hope his tweet gets more “likes” than Trump’s. The right to life is common to all, not just to Americans.

Clive Stafford Smith

Bridport, Dorset

• When the Syrian civil war started in March 2011, most British journalists thought Bashar al-Assad would be deposed by Christmas. I had recently returned from a two-year teaching contract in Syria and thought this was extremely unlikely. That seven years later Jeremy Hunt has reached the same conclusion gives me no satisfaction, given that over 250,000 people have died in the interim. In his latest statement (Assad will stay in power ‘for a while’, Hunt acknowledges, 4 January) the minister fails to explain why keeping US forces in Syria would “make the streets of London safer”.

I do not recall any Syrian terrorist attacks on London, other than those mounted by anti-Assad Isis forces. Some of these British jihadists returned to Syria to seek to overthrow the regime there; a goal they seem now to share with Jeremy Hunt.

Paul Anthony Hewitson

Berlin, Germany

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