(The AEGIS Alliance) – Just how many U.S. ground troops are deployed in the country of Syria? In late November, the official Pentagon figure was at 502 and while that was a fake number and isn’t what it was purported to be. Eric Pahon, a Pentagon spokesman, said the previous public figure of 503 was an “Artificial Construct” that had become increasingly inaccurate as the military campaign against the ISIS Daesh progressed further. The Pentagon had made an announcement that over 400 U.S. Marines had been withdrawn from Syria during the end of that month.

However, in the first week of December the official figure has risen all the way up to 2,000 troops, this is almost four times the total amount that was previously disclosed. This is even while no new troops were supposed to be deployed, and yes indeed over 400 soldiers had just left Syria. In recent days, the Pentagon has said that these soldiers are going to stay in Syria, with no set time for their deployment to end.

Col. Robert Manning states the 2,000 troops is just an approximate number, in accordance with President Donald J. Trump’s policy of not having troop levels be a matter of public records. This is meaning to say, it’s expected this level around 2,000 is closer to reality than the 502 figure.

The newest quarterly report from the Defense Manpower Data Center, which is different from the others in that it is believed to actually be true, and accounts for 1,720 U.S. soldiers in Syria in September of this year. The Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) is required to offer quarterly reports about overseas U.S. deployments. It is an unknown if there were additional deployments since that time, though there was the fairly sizable withdrawal during the end of November.

Kyle James Lee – The AEGIS Alliance – This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.