Outgoing Syria Envoy Admits Hiding US Troop Numbers

By Staff, Agencies

Retiring US diplomat Jim Jeffrey acknowledged that his team routinely misled senior leaders about troop levels in Syria.

“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey said in an interview. The actual number of US occupation troops in northeast Syria is “a lot more than” the two hundred troops US President Donald Trump agreed to leave there in 2019.

Relatively, Trump’s abruptly-announced withdrawal of US troops from Syria remains perhaps the single-most controversial foreign policy move during his first years in office, and for Jeffrey, “the most controversial thing in my fifty years in government.”

The order, first handed down in December 2018, led to the resignation of former War Secretary Jim Mattis. It catapulted Jeffrey, then Trump’s special envoy for Syria, into the role of special envoy in the alleged counter-Daesh [the Arabic acronym for terrorist ‘ISIS/ISIL’ group] fight when it sparked the protest resignation of his predecessor, Brett McGurk.