Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters on Dec. 19 that the number of U.S. troops deployed to Syria is around 2,000, which is twice as many than previously acknowledged.
Ryder said the number has remained such for months or longer.
The Department of Defense (DoD) has long maintained that there are 900 U.S. service members in Syria, apparently to eliminate and deter the spread of the terrorist group ISIS.
“As I understand it, and as it was explained to me, these additional forces are considered temporary rotational forces that are deployed to meet shifting mission requirements, whereas the core 900 deployers are on longer-term deployments.
Ryder said he learned the real number the same day and acknowledged it was “significantly higher” than the DoD previously announced.
Syria has been locked in a bitter civil war since 2011, with rebel groups backed by the United States and Turkey attempting to overthrow the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russia.
The United States intervened directly in 2014 as part of an international operation to fight ISIS in eastern Syria and has maintained a token presence there related to that mission.
The war took a dramatic shift in recent weeks, as rebels launched a lightning campaign against Assad’s forces, capturing huge swathes of territory after years of stalemate. Assad’s regime has now fallen, and the deposed leader has fled to Moscow.
“These forces, which augment the Defeat ISIS mission, were there before the fall of the Assad regime,” Ryder said.
“I don’t have a specific date to provide but my understanding is it’s been for a while.”
Ryder said that rotational forces were often deployed to the region on a 30-90-day basis and did not specify how long the elevated troop levels have been kept in place. Thus, rotational forces may have been used to elevate U.S. force numbers in the region for months or years.
“I think it would be fair to say, at a minimum, months,” Ryder said.
Ryder didn’t clarify the operational reasoning behind using rotational forces to double the U.S. presence in Syria for such a prolonged timeline and reiterated that the troops were all deployed as part of the counter-ISIS mission.
He said Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had not given any order to obfuscate the true number of forces in Syria and would not speak to whether or not President Joe Biden was informed that 2,000 troops were in Syria.
National leadership in Syria appears poised to be led by the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is currently designated by the United States as a terrorist organization due to its historic ties to Al Qaeda.
HTS leader Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa previously fought against U.S. troops in Iraq and has claimed to have been arrested and imprisoned in the notorious Abu Ghraib facility.
