Jul 15, 2018

The US military is bracing for a diminished role in Syria as President Donald Trump meets with Vladimir Putin on Monday, days after Bashar al-Assad’s forces raised their flag over the birthplace of the Syrian revolution.

In the lead-up to the leaders’ summit in Helsinki, the State Department’s Near East Affairs Bureau appears ready to give up on a cease-fire zone in southwest Syria that has already been significantly truncated by Assad’s recent victory in Daraa. National security adviser John Bolton, however, is pushing for a more aggressive US posture against Assad ally Iran.

Ever since Trump halted a program to train Syrian rebels to fight pro-Assad forces last summer, the Defense Department has lacked an overt military policy for the wider war beyond the fight against the Islamic State, a source with knowledge of the situation told Al-Monitor.

As internal US sparring over Syria policy has continued without a clear winner, the rebel opposition has withered. Syria’s Southern Front, once a 40,000-strong alliance that tested Assad’s mettle, had shrunk to 15 groups with 8,000-10,000 fighters and remained heavily dependent on foreign support just before pro-regime troops began the drive to wrest Daraa from rebel control.

The city’s fate was all but sealed when officials at the US Embassy in Amman sent a WhatsApp message to rebels in Syria’s southwest telling them not to expect American military help to enforce the cease-fire.