The US military has announced that the process of withdrawing the estimated 2,000 US troops in Syria has officially begun. They say there will be no specifics reported on numbers or timelines because of “operational security.”



This follows a week of speculation about the process, and comes just a day after Pentagon officials said that there had been no changes to the timeline, despite John Bolton’s weekend talk of making the pullout “conditional.”



And while the military isn’t giving any specifics, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is. The observatory reported that a convoy of US armored vehicles was the first of the pullout, and was seen leaving the town of Rmeilan into neighboring Iraq.



That the process of withdrawing from Syria involves driving into Iraq, and the US troops are all on the side of Syria closest to the Iraq border, it once again raises questions of why the pullout is expected to take months, instead of the few hours such a trip would take.





Author: Jason Ditz Jason Ditz is news editor of Antiwar.com. View all posts by Jason Ditz