Brett McGurk, the top Trump administration envoy to the global anti-ISIS coalition who abruptly tendered his resignation on Friday following President Donald Trump’s surprise decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria, blasted the Trump’s sudden about-face in an email to colleagues on Saturday, the New York Times reports.
- “The recent decision by the president came as a shock and was a complete reversal of policy that was articulated to us,” McGurk, who the Times described as “considered by many to be the glue holding together” the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, he wrote in his email. “It left our coalition partners confused and our fighting partners bewildered.”
- “I worked this week to help manage some of the fallout but — as many of you heard in my meetings and phone calls — I ultimately concluded that I could not carry out these new instructions and maintain my integrity,” McGurk added.
- McGurks’ scathing condemnation of Trump’s quixotic approach to the current U.S. involvement in the anti-ISIS campaign in Syria came just one day after Secretary of Defense James Mattis submitted his own letter of resignation vocally objecting to the president’s sudden pivot.
- Unlike Mattis, Trump did not directly address McGurk’s departure, writing on Twitter on Saturday afternoon that, “when I became President, ISIS was going wild … Now ISIS is largely defeated and other local countries, including Turkey, should be able to easily take care of whatever remains.”
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