SYRIA; Congressional Record Vol. 164, No. 201

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SYRIA

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, Syria has been a mess and a concern for

quite a number of years. By putting in a small footprint now of a

little over 2,000 special operations troops, the United States has been

considerably successful when you think of what a chaotic place it was

and still is and that it was especially inimical to the interests of

the United States just a

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few years ago. Remember the horrible images of U.S. citizens being

executed by ISIS. Remember all of the trauma we have seen the Syrian

Government perpetrate on its own people.

Remember the successful efforts of a combination of forces that

ultimately took on ISIS, that removed it from its headquarters of its

caliphate and caused it to disperse if it were not eliminated at the

time. A lot of that was led with Kurdish fighters who were fighting

alongside U.S. special operations advisers. Even though complicated

because of the Russians' being there and the Turks' having interests

and Assad's trying to hang on to power, the United States has been

successful in not eliminating but in lessening the influence of ISIS.

Then came the shocker--the shocker of the President's announcing

unilaterally that, all of a sudden, he was going to pull the special

operations troops, as advisers, out of Syria. This would likely cause

immediate instability. It would certainly allow for ISIS to reconstruct

itself, and it would cause chaos with the Kurdish troops who fought

alongside the Americans, with the Turkish Government's going after a

number of them.

This is an ill-advised and probably a non-advised decision by the

President, and it should be reversed. This Senator calls on all of the

national defense, national security, and national intelligence

professionals who are within the administration to get the President to

reverse this unilateral decision that he has made. Otherwise, U.S.

interests are going to be ill-served.

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