Who’s Still Fighting Who in Syria’s Eight-Year War

Defending an announcement to pull back dozens of American troops from Syria who’d been working closely with Kurdish-led forces in the fight against Islamic State, President Donald Trump said it was time to let others “figure the situation out” there. He nominated a long list of parties. To be sure, the Syrian war, which began in 2011, has attracted plenty of combatants, engaged in the conflict for a variety of reasons.

The U.S. for years provided covert support to Syrian rebels fighting the Syrian regime, with the aim of pressuring President Bashar al-Assad into a political settlement, but it ditched that program in mid-2017. The American military has directly attacked the regime rarely, in response to its alleged use of chemical weapons. The main role of the U.S. has been fighting Islamic State. It began an air campaign against the group in 2014 and sent in ground troops the next year to assist Kurdish forces fighting the jihadists. After Islamic State lost territorial control of the caliphate it had declared, Trump in December 2018 announced that the U.S. would withdraw its 2,000 troops from Syria. In the event, it reduced them by about half.