Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee appeared to find common ground at a hearing on the future of Syria on Thursday, coalescing around a desire to ensure that the U.S. remains engaged in the country and works with the new Syrian government on developing a relationship based on specific conditions and benchmarks.

“The important thing here, I think, today, something that’s noteworthy, is how unanimous we are in thinking about what should be done and how we ought to go about it,” Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID), the committee’s chair, said. “Obviously the devil’s always in the details, but there is really unanimity as far as how to proceed and that’s good. As we go forward, that unanimity will be helpful.”

Michael Singh, the managing director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Dana Stroul, the research director at The Washington Institute, who jointly authored a 2019 congressional report for the bipartisan Syria Study Group, testified before the committee, offering largely similar recommendations and assessments about the situation on the ground, which found broad purchase among the committee members on both sides of the aisle.

Singh, in his opening remarks, urged the U.S. to continue counterterrorism operations and partnerships in Syria, particularly with the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF); find areas where the U.S. can work, cautiously, with the new Syrian government such as combating Iran, ISIS and border security; begin sanctions relief in phases based on specific benchmarks; reach an agreement with Turkey to protect Syrian sovereignty; and work to ensure non-aggression between Israel and Syria, with a potential peace accord down the road.

The U.S. is reportedly supportive of Israeli plans to remain in a buffer zone inside Syria for several years.

Stroul said that U.S. policy should focus on determining what commitments it wants from the new Syrian leadership, on setting standards to provide sanctions relief and on the circumstances under which the U.S. might, in the long term, be able to transfer its counterterrorism operations to the Syrian government. 

Both also emphasized the need to ensure that Russia and Iran do not regain a foothold in Syria, through U.S. engagement with the new government. Stroul noted that the new Syrian government has shown some positive steps toward benchmarks it has set for itself, including dismantling other armed groups and preventing weapons trafficking by Hezbollah into Lebanon.

Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) warned that Iran and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are attempting to exploit the freeze in U.S. aid and fill those gaps. 

“I think you’re right that where Iran sees a poorly governed or ungoverned space in the Middle East, it tries to fill that space, and it fills that space with its proxies. Proxies sometimes that it creates out of whole cloth,” Singh said. “We don’t want to see that happen again.”

Countering Iran, he said, is an area where the U.S. can try to work with the new Syrian government, which could ultimately be a “new powerful tool in our toolkit to counter Iran in the region.”

Stroul also warned about the impacts of the Trump administration’s halt to U.S. aid, the shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development and anticipated staff reductions at the State Department, which she cautioned risk depriving the U.S. of valuable resources, expertise and programs that can help it maintain a presence in Syria and set the country on a path toward stability and deradicalization.

She said repeatedly that the U.S. must maintain its military presence in Syria in the near term to prevent a resurgence of ISIS. President Donald Trump, and several of his administration’s senior officials, have expressed interest in a quick U.S. withdrawal.

The SDF, Stroul explained, is fighting for its own survival against other hostile groups in Syria — largely backed by Turkey — and a U.S. drawdown would leave the group unable to continue its counterterrorism missions or guarding prisons and camps holding ISIS fighters and a generation of displaced young people that ISIS aims to recruit. She said that Turkey, if it continues its efforts against the SDF, could be a “huge spoiler” by kneecapping its counter-ISIS operations and capabilities.

“We’ve seen this before. We saw it in Afghanistan, when the United States withdrew hastily and without a plan,” Stroul said, referring to the prospect of a quick U.S. drawdown from Syria. “The local Afghan security forces that we worked to train collapsed, and the Taliban has reimposed brutal rule over Afghanistan.”

Risch, long a critic of Ankara, said that the conflict between Turkey and the Kurds “causes us no end of grief. Turkey is allegedly an ally of ours. Sometimes, at best, a recalcitrant ally, particularly when it comes to that relationship.”

Singh and Stroul said that the U.S. should urge its Arab partners like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to step up to provide reconstruction and stabilization aid to Syria. Singh said that the U.S. should be focused more on creating structures and avenues for such aid to flow, such as targeted and phased sanctions relief, rather than on using U.S. aid money directly inside Syria.