U.S. troops have withdrawn from the outpost in Syria where a handful of American special operators and Marines fought off an assault by Russian mercenaries in 2018, a battle in which the American troops left a force 10 times their size scattered across the desert battlefield.
The end of the U.S. presence at Mission Support Site Euphrates came as part of a wider drawdown in Syria in May, with American troops withdrawing from multiple bases used in the fight against ISIS, according to a new quarterly report from the Department of Defense’s Office of Inspector General on Operation Inherent Resolve.
Mission Support Site Euphrates is an outpost on the eastern banks of the Euphrates River in Khasham, Deir ez-Zor province. In 2018, a small group of U.S. troops and Syrian Democratic Forces, or S