A top U.S. envoy leading a global coalition fighting Islamic State has quit over U.S. President Donald Trump's decision last week to pull U.S. troops out of Syria, a source familiar with the matter said on Saturday.
Brett McGurk, U.S. special presidential envoy for the global coalition to defeat the radical Sunni terrorist group, submitted his resignation effective Dec. 31 to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday, a State Department official said.
In an abrupt policy shift, Trump announced on Wednesday that Washington would withdraw the roughly 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria, upending a pillar of American policy in the Middle East and alarming U.S. allies.
The decision was followed on Thursday by the surprise departure of U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, who, in a resignation letter to Trump, exposed the growing divide between the two over foreign policy.
McGurk, who was slated to leave his post in February 2019, objected to Trump's decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, a person familiar with the matter said, and added that Mattis' departure had a "significant impact" on McGurk's resignation.
"The recent decision by the president came as a shock and was a complete reversal of policy," he said in an email to his staff viewed by The Associated Press.
"It left our coalition partners confused and our fighting partners bewildered with no plan in place or even considered thought as to consequences."
Trump's announcement of the withdrawal "left our coalition partners confused and our fighting partners bewildered with no plan in place or even considered thought as to consequences," the email went on.
Trump, for his part, played down the development, tweeting Saturday night that "I do not know" the envoy and it's a "nothing event."
The president noted McGurk planned to leave soon anyway and added: "Grandstander?"
"The Fake News is making such a big deal about this nothing event!" he said on Twitter.
McGurk, whose resignation is effective Dec. 31, was planning to leave the job in mid-February after a U.S.-hosted meeting of foreign ministers from the coalition countries, but he felt he could not continue any longer after Trump's decision to withdraw from Syria, coupled with Mattis' resignation.
In his email to his staff, McGurk said: "I worked this week to help manage some of the fallout, but – as many of you heard in my many meetings and phone calls – I ultimately concluded that I could not carry out these new instructions and maintain my integrity at the same time."
A senior administration official referred to McGurk as "an architect of Obama's failed Iran deal." Trump earlier this year abandoned a 2015 landmark deal former U.S. President Barack Obama reached with Iran to curb its nuclear program.
McGurk was appointed by Obama in 2015 and has been instrumental in shaping Washington's policy in northern Syria, particularly its backing of Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militia that have been fighting Islamic State with U.S. support for three years.
The U.S. allied forces have won significant victories against the Sunni jihadi group in northern Syria, retaking key cities such as Raqqa, once deemed the capital of its self-declared caliphate. But McGurk, along with other U.S. government agencies, believed the fight against the terrorist group was hardly over.
"It would be reckless if we were just to say, well, the physical caliphate is defeated, so we can just leave now," McGurk told reporters in a Dec. 11 briefing at the State Department. "Nobody is declaring a mission accomplished."
By contrast, Trump has claimed victory against Islamic State and considers the mission in Syria over given the group's territorial losses. "Now ISIS is largely defeated and other local countries, including Turkey, should be able to easily take care of whatever remains," Trump wrote on Twitter on Saturday.
Trump's declaration of triumph has alarmed key NATO allies such as France and Germany, who said the change of course on Syria risks damaging the fight against Islamic State, which has now been squeezed to a sliver of Syrian territory.
