Breaking news this Saturday: three Americans are dead in Syria tonight, three more are wounded, and the attack—described by U.S. Central Command as an ambush carried out by a lone ISIS gunman—has once again dragged the Syrian war back into the American consciousness for a few brief hours, which is usually all the time the public gives it before the news cycle moves on and the families are left to carry the weight alone.
CENTCOM says two of the dead were U.S. service members and one was an American civilian contractor, and that the attacker was engaged and killed as well, with names being withheld until next of kin are notified, which is the right thing to do; but even with those official facts in hand, I want to slow the pace down a little bit and do what I always try to do here—put this in context—because in a place like Syria, the story you get in the headline is almost never the story that explains why this happened.
I’m not interested in reporting tragedy like it’s a scoreboard, and I’m not interested in repeating a paragraph of breaking news without the background that makes it intelligible; I spent eight years in the military, and I’ve spent more than twenty years following the U.S. military across the globe—Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria included, with more than a dozen trips into Afghanistan, roughly fifteen into Iraq, and seven or so into Syria—so when Americans die in a place most people couldn’t find on a map, I feel a responsibility to show you what the map actually means.
The desert isn’t empty—ISIS hides in the “nothing”
The reported location of the attack is Palmyra—Palmira on some maps—an ancient city in central Syria that sits on the edge of a brutal expanse of desert, the kind of wide open, sun-blasted country where outsiders assume nothing lives and nothing happens, when in reality it’s exactly the kind of terrain insurgents love because “nothing” is a perfect disguise, a perfect place to move, cache weapons, blend into small villages, disappear into wadis, and wait for opportunities.
Palmyra also sits inside territory controlled by Syria’s new administration under Ahmed al-Sharaa, and if that name makes you pause, it should, because this is where Syrian politics gets complicated in the way only Syria can do: al-Sharaa rose through jihadist ranks, he has a history tied to insurgent warfare against Americans in Iraq, he was captured and held for years, and he later returned to Syria and consolidated power with strong Turkish backing—so when you hear phrases like “new Syrian administration” or “transitional government,” don’t imagine a Western-style democracy that suddenly appeared out of the sand; imagine a patchwork of militias, alliances of convenience, old enemies wearing new uniforms, and a leadership class that wants international legitimacy while carrying a past that cannot be scrubbed clean with a new suit and a new flag.
Now layer on top of that the reality that ISIS is not gone from Syria, not even close.
U.S. estimates have long suggested there are still roughly 2,000 to 3,000 ISIS fighters operating in and around the central Syrian desert, and there are far more than that if you include facilitators, family networks, financiers, and the enormous number of ISIS-linked detainees and relatives held in camps and makeshift prisons; and while that fight has mostly slipped out of the American public’s view, it continues quietly, relentlessly, week after week, because the moment pressure is relieved in a place like this, the violence doesn’t fade—it regroups.
Why American troops are still there—despite everything
The United States currently has about 900 troops in Syria, a number that matters because it tells you how thin the margin is between “containment” and “collapse,” especially when the enemy has deep local roots and decades of practice living off the land and off the grievances of the people around them; and those American troops are there for one primary purpose: to keep a lid on ISIS so we don’t wake up one day to another wave of mass executions, terror-state governance, and regional destabilization that forces the world back into a far more expensive war.
That’s the mission, and it’s not abstract; when ISIS surged the last time, the human cost was staggering, and it wasn’t paid by politicians or pundits—it was paid by Iraqi soldiers, Kurdish fighters, civilians, and yes, Americans too—and the reason our presence in Syria still functions as a deterrent is that in a powder keg region, a small, capable American footprint has a way of discouraging ambitious actors from taking the final step that turns instability into open war.
But here is the part that doesn’t get said out loud very often: the mission in Syria is increasingly tangled up in partnerships that are, at best, uneasy and, at worst, morally and strategically risky.
