Bye Bye Syria

For the first time in a decade, there are no U.S. bases in Syria. The Syrian foreign ministry and U.S. Central Command both announced on Thursday afternoon that U.S. forces had handed over their last base in Syria to the Syrian army. The U.S. military may continue to advise and support the Syrian army without permanent outposts.

U.S. troops first entered Syria in 2015 to support Kurdish rebels against the Islamic State group, which lost its last Syrian territory in 2019. President Donald Trump flip-flopped several times in his first term about whether U.S. troops would stay. He declared a U.S. withdrawal in December 2018, backtracked on it, declared another withdrawal in October 2019, and backtracked again after neighboring Turkey invaded Kurdish-held areas of Syria.

U.S. officials pushed to keep a military presence in Syria, shifting its mission from fighting the Islamic State group to confronting Iran and Russia. Trump administration envoy James Jeffrey publicly admitted to playing “shell games“ to hide the full size of the U.S. deployment and preempt political pressure to leave.

The Syrian civil war (and the major Russian-Iranian presence) ended with the December 2024 revolution, led by Ahmad al-Sharaa, a former commander in Al Qaeda who became a U.S.-friendly reformer. But the Trump administration considered keeping U.S. forces in Syria for good. Late last year, the U.S. military began joint patrols with the new Syrian army and visited the site of a potential U.S. base to monitor the Syrian-Israeli border.

Events in Syria seem to have made that option completely unpalatable. In December 2025, a Syrian police officer shot up a meeting between Syrian and U.S. troops in Palmyra, killing three Americans. It was a reminder that despite the new Syrian government’s eagerness to please Washington, many of its rank-and-file supporters still resented the foreign army on their soil.

Then, in January 2026, negotiations between the Kurdish rebels and the new Syrian government broke down. The Syrian army launched a lightning offensive that forced Kurds to submit to central government rule. Fearing a prison break amid the chaos, the U.S. military evacuated thousands of Islamic State suspects from Syrian Kurdish custody to Iraq. The decade-old alliance that had brought the U.S. military to Syria in the first place was over.

Finally, the war with Iran showed just how vulnerable American troops in the Middle East were to missiles and drones. Unlike the well-defended U.S. fortresses in Israel and the Persian Gulf monarchies, U.S. outposts in Syria were ramshackle affairs that lacked air defenses. A drone attack by Iraqi guerrillas in January 2024 had already killed three U.S. troops on the Syrian-Jordanian border.

The U.S. withdrawal from Syria happened under the best possible circumstances, with a friendly Syrian government in power and a minimum of violence. But it still happened against the will of hawks who wanted the U.S. military in Syria forever—with a constantly shifting justification.

=============================

If you feel powerless to help Gaza, you still has a choice: donate. When so much of what exists is false, authenticity is a powerful weapon we can wield that the state never could. So if you feel lost, hopeless, depressed, angry and afraid, I implore you to return - again - again - and again - to the feeling of love that exists within you that brought you here in the first place. It is only through this that we can remake the world. To redress Gaza’s famine, displacement, and destruction, independent and impartial humanitarian organizations - UN agencies, international and national NGOs - must be allowed to deliver relief at scale. To salvage Gaza’s people from the devastation inflicted by Israel, it must be unified with the West Bank to form an independent and sovereign Palestinian State, not to be parceled and colonized by the former.

Meanwhile, children continue to be shredded by US bombs, and the starvation reaches new depths of hellish collective punishment. If both parties are going to continue to support an ongoing genocide, at least they can both be honest about doing so, rather than having one openly bloodthirsty party, and another—unconvincingly—playing the role of powerless, bumbling humanitarian.

Please keep donate Gaza especially if you, as reader, has [background] International Relation [whatever universities]. IR Graduate means [you must, at least] get some semester [about] studying Middle East [in macro, not specifically Gaza].

We need more people to share fundraisers instead of only talking about Gaza. Some people think that those in Gaza don’t need money but that’s wrong. Almost everyone lost their source of income while essentials, food & medicine get sold for astronomical prices. So I put my attempt in all social media as I can, in twitter / X, in substack [since October 2023 I put link donation], in bluesky or bsky, in threads, in instagram.

Link to donate World Food Programme - Palestine appeal: click here

[Daniel Brühl]

link to donate

Most campaign shared or circulated in social media are for REAL people in Gaza. They’re legit. There are a lot of small campaigns for struggling families. This is their only lifeline. By donating & sharing, you are literally making history and alleviating part of their pain

Please do not rely on me alone for sharing your campaign. I’m only 1 person and sometimes I’m not online which is unreliable. I never ignore anybody on purpose but I have a very limited capacity & very little energy and time.

[Refaat Rafiq Alareer IF I MUST DIE] Refaat Rafiq Alareer was extremely hungry, November 2023, days before Refaat killed by Israel airstrike. If November 2023 already [one-by-one Gazan] extremely famine, extremely hungry, imagine November 2025 or more than 2 years Israel’s Genocide in Gaza.

[RENEW] 455 Languages IF I MUST DIE of Refaat Rafiq Alareer [by 6100+ Translators, Social Media Users]

Prada

·

December 20, 2023

Dec 9th, 2023, New York City, 4.10am —- with update total languages to be 310 as of July 1st, 2024, 3.52am New York City, and then, to be 350 languages as of July 28th, 2024, 1.37am ====== newest update as of July, 3rd, 2025 already 384 languages, and October 8th, 2025 reaches 455 languages across the globe.

Read full story

link donation click here

Thanks for reading Prada’s Newsletter.