The State Department unit overseeing the fight against the Islamic State group will stay in business for at least six more months, reversing an administration plan for the unit's imminent downgrade even as President Donald Trump presses ahead with a speedy US exit from Syria.
A plan initiated by Rex Tillerson before he was fired as secretary of state in March would have folded the office of the special envoy to the global coalition into the department's counterterrorism bureau as early as this spring, officials said.
Tillerson's successor, Mike Pompeo, cancelled the plan this month, and the office will stay an independent entity until at least December, when there will be a new review, said the officials, who weren't authorized to discuss the plan publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The office reports directly to the secretary of state and the president, and the planned shift would have undercut its status and the priority of its mission. It could have led to staffing and budget cuts as well as the departure of the special envoy, Brett McGurk.
He is now expected to remain in his job at least through the end of the year. Still, the officials said Trump's intent to reduce the US military and civilian stabilisation presence in Syria has not changed.
The State Department has ended all funding for stabilisation programmes in Syria's northwest. Islamic State militants have been almost entirely eliminated from the region, which is controlled by a hodgepodge of other extremist groups and Syrian President Bashar Assad's government forces.
At least some of the US money for those projects is expected to be redirected to Syria's northeast where IS fighters remain, the officials said.
The conflicting moves of retaining McGurk's office while pulling out of the northwest illustrate how the administration is being pulled in different directions by Trump's two competing interests: extricating the US from messy Mideast conflicts and delivering a permanent defeat to the Islamic State group.
Trump has said the United States will be withdrawing from Syria "like very soon."
"Hopefully, Syria will start to stabilize," Trump said last week as he met with NATO's secretary-general at the White House. "You see what's been happening. It's been a horror show."