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While Trump has repeatedly made clear his desire to bring US troops home from Syria, he has been persuaded in the past by advisers to give the mission more time. It's not clear that such a reversal will be forthcoming now, however.

"We know Trump's instincts from the get-go were to get these guys out of Syria," Tamara Wittes, a former State Department Middle East official now with the Brookings Institution, told Al-Monitor. "And yet, he has clearly been persuaded at several points 'not yet, ISIS is not quite defeated, but we can use [the troop presence] as leverage against Iran.' He becomes persuaded, and then at a certain point, ... he decides enough is enough. He just changes his mind."

Some current and former US officials faulted what they saw as overreach by administration Iran hawks, in particular US Syria envoy Jim Jeffrey and his lieutenant, Joel Rayburn, the deputy assistant secretary of state for the Levant, who have argued publicly that US forces would not leave Syria until all Iranian forces had left.

"The people who work for [Trump] -- Bolton, Rayburn, now Jeffrey -- make it worse by adding impossible objectives on Syria [involving Iran] that suggest an indefinite stay," said the US official who called Trump's decision catastrophic. The official said these arguments have "no connection to realistic objectives for our military" and go "way beyond" the goal of defeating IS and preventing its re-emergence.

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