While Donald Trump's top advisers attempt to simultaneously enact and sabotage his plans for a U.S. military withdrawal from Syria, the military itself seems to be taking an old-school, orthodox approach to its commander's orders. While Chris Woods, the founder of nonprofit Airwars, which tracks civilian deaths in war zones such as Syria, tells Mother Jones the group is still "seeing a high number of strikes, relatively speaking" in the country, the magazine reports that coalition leadership has decided to delay and muddy the public reporting of those strikes.
For the past several months, the coalition has acknowledged the date, location, and intended targets of its air and artillery strikes in Syria and Iraq, but decided on January 4 to reduce the frequency and specificity of these reports, citing the “continued degradation of ISIS” as a reason for watered-down updates. [...]
In its January 4 report, officials left out crucial information about the location of strikes and tersely noted that future releases would only be published biweekly.
To be clear, there seems to be no significant reduction in the scope or number of strikes, if Airwars' tracking is accurate. There is only a reduction in the information given out about those strikes. And it's a policy change that appears to affect no other ongoing U.S. military operations—just those in Syria.
The suspicion here, of course, is that the change is a deliberate effort to downplay military operations in Syria even as they continue, and that the downplaying may be a military effort more to (cough) fly under the radar of Donald J. Trump (cough) than to inconvenience press or humanitarian watchers. Trump surprised his staff with the announcement of withdrawal from Syria in mid-December; within two weeks, the military altered reporting to reduce the detail and timeliness of its public reports. Even as military strikes continue and national security adviser John Bolton works to soften or reverse Trump's position, the military is, if nothing else, going to reduce the perception of how much fighting is taking place in Syria, in accordance with Trump's own declarations that ISIS has been "defeated," and that there is no further reason for U.S. involvement in Syria.
Given the steep odds against Trump's declaration and the new policy change happening, coincidentally, a few weeks apart, that is almost certainly what is going on. And you can't say it's not a sound move on their part. The military, like everyone else in the nation, knows that Trump cares more about appearances than details. If Americans hear less about U.S. military strikes in Syria, it may satisfy Trump as much as a true withdrawal would.