WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will travel to Egypt, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey next week, on a trip focused on stabilization and reconstruction after the territorial defeat of the so-called Islamic State (IS), US officials and diplomats tell Al-Monitor.

But as US and coalition partners try to consolidate battlefield gains after uprooting the IS “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria, former US diplomats and experts warn that the vagueness of Washington's goals for post-IS Syria could come to haunt policymakers. They express foreboding that the Donald Trump administration says it intends to keep some 2,000 US troops in eastern Syria until it achieves its broad political goals for Syria. Those goals, as laid out in a speech by Tillerson last month, include not just preventing IS’ return, but countering Iran’s presence in Syria, deterring an Iranian threat to US regional allies, making way for refugees to return and advancing a postwar Syrian political settlement that would see the departure of Bashar al-Assad. 

Former US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford warned that US troops in eastern Syria do not give Washington sufficient leverage to meaningfully dictate the political outcome in Assad-controlled western Syria, where most of the population lives. Meanwhile, US troops and civilian officials working to stabilize eastern Syria could become targets of violence to generate American domestic political opposition to continuing their presence there, he said.

“Having an ill-defined military mission [that] people at home don’t support … I don’t know what the tolerance level is for casualties,” Ford, now a fellow with the Middle East Institute, told Al-Monitor in an interview today. “And the Trump administration will have nothing to show for it. Then pressure will begin to leave.”