Number of US troops in Syria has steadily increased over time, Pentagon now says

By Natasha Bertrand, Oren Liebermann and Katie Bo Lillis, CNN

(CNN) — The number of US troops in Syria has regularly surged higher than the Pentagon has publicly disclosed since at least 2020, and in recent months increased to more than double the roughly 900 troops the US has long said are in Syria, multiple defense officials familiar with the matter told CNN.

The Pentagon said last week that the additional troops beyond the 900 are “temporary.” But on Monday, Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, acknowledged that the numbers of forces in Syria “in general have increased over time as the threat has increased to baseline forces.”

Ryder first revealed on Thursday that the number of troops in Syria is around 2,000, “significantly higher than what we’ve been briefing” in recent months and years. He also said that he only found out about the larger footprint there in recent days.

The Army’s director of plans, operations, and training distributed the true number internally earlier this month, two officials told CNN. It is not clear when exactly the troop numbers reached their current peak, but the US surged additional assets and personnel to the Middle East following last year’s October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel.

On Monday, the Pentagon issued a new statement attempting to clarify the long-standing discrepancy about the number of troops in Syria.

“In addition to the approximately 900 baseline troops, there are also approximately 1,100 U.S. military personnel in Syria that deploy for shorter durations as temporary enablers in support of force protection, transportation, maintenance, or other emerging operational requirements,” Ryder said.

“The numbers of these additional temporary forces have fluctuated over the past several years based on mission needs but in general have increased over time as the threat has increased to baseline forces,” he added.

Defense officials have long been reluctant to reveal the true troop numbers in Syria because it could risk angering neighboring partner countries, particularly Iraq, sources told CNN. When the Pentagon first acknowledged the larger troop presence, Ryder said there are “diplomatic and operational security considerations oftentimes with our deployments.”

Syria isn’t the only country where the Pentagon has more troops deployed than it has previously said. In its statement Monday, the Pentagon acknowledged there may be more than 2,500 troops in Iraq, the baseline number the military has used for its military footprint in the country. But the Pentagon did not provide any additional details on how many more troops are in Iraq, only saying there are “some additional temporary enablers deployed on a rotational basis.”

“However, due to operations security and diplomatic considerations, we do not have any more specifics to provide,” Ryder said in the statement. The vague reference to additional troops in Iraq leaves open the possibility of a significantly larger presence than was previously acknowledged, just as in Syria.

The US military presence in Iraq is a sensitive issue for Iraqi officials, who have said publicly they want US troops out of the country. If the Iraqis saw the number of troops increasing in Syria, they’d fear the US was doing so in Iraq as well, officials explained, which it now appears may be the case. It is particularly delicate in the midst of negotiations about the future US military footprint in Iraq.

For more than a year, Washington and Baghdad have engaged in a series of talks about the future of the US military presence in the country. In January, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani made the goal of the discussions clear when he said the aim was to “end the presence of the international coalition forces in Iraq permanently.” The US military footprint in Syria relies on support from US troops in Iraq, and a larger presence in the former could necessitate more troops in the latter.

Defense officials insist the Pentagon has not misled the public about the core number of troops in Syria, which they have said since 2020 is around 900. Most of those are special operations forces, one defense official said, and the military rarely acknowledges changes to special operations troop levels. Officials say the additional 1,100 or so that have been stationed there in recent months are “temporary enabling” forces, primarily with the Army, that are meant to augment the core presence with logistical and defensive help.

But those troops are typically replaced as soon as they finish their rotations, which are frequently three months or less, so the total number has consistently surged above 900 over the years, officials said.

Concealing the true number of US troops in Syria dates to Donald Trump’s first administration. In 2020, the outgoing US envoy to Syria, Jim Jeffrey, acknowledged that his team routinely misled senior military leaders about troop levels there, which suggests it was not exclusively military officials keeping the number under wraps.

“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey told Defense One at the time. Trump in 2019 had agreed to keep roughly 200 to 400 US troops in Syria, but the actual number was “a lot more,” Jeffrey said.

There are even more civilian contractors in the country. A report from the Congressional Research Service said there were more than 5,400 contractors in Iraq and Syria in the second quarter of 2024.

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