Appointed to the post by President Barack Obama in 2015 and retained by Trump, McGurk said in his resignation letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that the militants were on the run, but not yet defeated, and that the premature pullout of US forces from Syria would create the conditions that gave rise to IS.
Shortly after news of McGurk’s resignation broke, Trump again defended his decision to pull all of the roughly 2,000 US forces from Syria in the coming weeks.
Although the civil war in Syria has gone on since 2011, the US did not begin launching airstrikes against IS until September 2014, and American troops did not go into Syria until 2015.
McGurk, whose resignation is effective Dec. 31, was planning to leave the job in mid-February after a US-hosted meeting of foreign ministers from the coalition countries, but he felt he could continue no longer after Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria and Mattis’ resignation.
The withdrawal decision will fulfill Trump’s goal of bringing troops home from Syria, but military leaders have pushed back for months, arguing that the IS group remains a threat and could regroup in Syria’s long-running civil war. US policy has been to keep troops in place until the extremists are eradicated.
A former Supreme Court law clerk to the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, McGurk worked as a lawyer for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq after the 2003 US-led invasion and joined Bush’s National Security Council staff, where in 2007 and 2008, he was the lead US negotiator on security agreements with Iraq.
IS militants still hold a string of villages and towns along the Euphrates River in eastern Syria, where they have resisted weeks of attacks by the US-supported Syrian Democratic Forces to drive them out. The pocket is home to about 15,000 people, among them 2,000 IS fighters, according to US military estimates.