The United States has begun withdrawing its military forces from Syria, senior defense officials confirmed Wednesday, as the Trump administration escalates pressure on Iran — and as a rare left-right coalition in Congress races to prevent the executive branch from launching strikes on Tehran without legislative approval.
The withdrawal, first reported by the BBC, ends a years-long American military presence in northeastern Syria where roughly 900 US troops had been stationed alongside Kurdish-led forces fighting remnants of the Islamic State. The decision comes as the Trump administration has significantly ratcheted up rhetoric and military posturing toward Iran, raising fears in Washington and allied capitals that the Middle East is drifting toward a broader armed confrontation.
The timing is not lost on military analysts. Withdrawing from Syria frees up assets and reduces the number of American forces exposed to potential Iranian-backed retaliation, but it also removes a key stabilizing presence in a country where Iran, Russia, Turkey, and an array of proxy forces have competed for influence since the civil war began in 2011. For the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces — who fought alongside American troops for years against ISIS at enormous cost — the withdrawal represents a second abandonment in less than a decade, following the 2019 pullback under the first Trump administration that opened the door to a Turkish military incursion.
"The Kurdish partners are being left exposed again," one former US Central Command official told this correspondent, speaking on condition of anonymity. "When we leave, the vacuum fills — and right now, the most capable force ready to fill it in northeastern Syria is Iranian-backed militias. That is the strategic paradox here. You're removing US forces to reduce escalation risk with Iran, while simultaneously creating space for Iran to consolidate."
It is precisely this kind of executive maneuver — moving military pieces on the board while Congress watches from the sidelines — that prompted Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, and Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, to announce they would force a House floor vote on a War Powers resolution explicitly blocking the president from striking Iran without congressional authorization. The announcement came within hours of the Syria withdrawal news breaking, a coincidence of timing that neither office disputed when contacted.
"Congress must do its job and stop this march to war," Khanna said in a statement. The Khanna-Massie resolution invokes the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing armed forces to hostilities and limits unauthorized deployments to 60 days. The law has rarely been enforced with teeth, but a House floor vote — if it proceeds — would force every member to go on record about whether the president can unilaterally strike a sovereign nation without legislative sanction.
The partisan geography of that coalition is itself the story. Khanna is one of the most prominent progressive voices in the House Democratic caucus. Massie is a libertarian-leaning conservative who has voted against defense authorizations and foreign aid packages that many of his Republican colleagues support reflexively. That they are standing together on this question reflects a constitutional argument — that the power to declare war belongs to Congress, not the White House — that cuts across ideological lines when the stakes are high enough.
The Syria withdrawal and the Iran War Powers push are, in the editor's framing, one story: Congress is pulling the reins just as the executive branch is repositioning the board. American forces are leaving a country where Iranian-backed proxies operate freely. American lawmakers are simultaneously demanding that any escalation toward Iran itself require their consent. The two moves describe a single contested question: who in the American constitutional system gets to decide whether this country goes to war?
For the communities that bear the human cost of these decisions — the military families in Fort Bragg, Fort Campbell, and the dozens of bases whose personnel have rotated through northeastern Syria — the policy debate has a concrete address. The men and women coming home from Syria are the same people who would be ordered into harm's way if strikes on Iran trigger a regional escalation. As Americans like to say, "all politics is local" — even in the nation's capital. But the politics of war and peace are local to every ZIP code in the country.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the War Powers resolution before this article was published. The Pentagon confirmed the Syria withdrawal was underway but declined to provide a specific timeline for completion.
