McGurk's take

Mr. McGurk wrote in an email to his team that he had been planning to leave government service in February and take a position at Stanford University, but decided to accelerate his departure over Mr. Trump’s decision to abruptly withdraw from Syria, according to a copy reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

“It left our coalition partners confused and our fighting partners bewildered with no plan in place or even considered thought as to consequences,” Mr. McGurk wrote in the email.

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“I worked this week to help manage some of the fallout, but … ultimately concluded that I could not carry out these new instructions and maintain my integrity at the same time,” Mr. McGurk wrote to his team.

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A week before his resignation, Mr. McGurk had delivered a lengthy briefing to reporters at the State Department explaining why it was critical to keep U.S. troops and reconstruction efforts going in Syria. He said both were needed to prevent Islamic State from making a comeback after a U.S.-led effort had retaken nearly all of the group’s territory.

“Obviously, it would be reckless if we were just to say, ‘Well, the physical caliphate is defeated, so we can just leave now.’ I think anyone who’s looked at a conflict like this would agree with that,” Mr. McGurk told reporters then.

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Mr. McGurk said in the email to his staff that resigning had been a tough decision, but that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo deserved a leadership team that could implement the sudden policy shift in good faith.

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Mr. McGurk previously had clashed with administration officials over the stabilization effort in Iraq, which centered around a United Nations-led program to restore basic services to villages that had been liberated from Islamic State. He viewed the program as essential to filling the vacuum left by the extremist group and preventing their return.

However the Trump administration, in an effort led by Vice President Mike Pence, ordered the bulk of the U.S. funding for the stabilization effort to be redirected to Christians and other minorities in the country.

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Mr. McGurk wrote a separate resignation letter to Mr. Pompeo, according a person briefed on its contents.

In that letter, Mr. McGurk told the secretary that the mission to defeat Islamic State hadn’t been fully accomplished and a decision to withdraw prematurely would create a vacuum that could allow terrorist groups like Islamic State to re-emerge.

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The Global Coalition to Defeat Islamic State was an organization of 79 countries that aimed to coordinate efforts to dismantle the extremist group from its territory in Iraq and Syria and ensure it would not return.

Mr. McGurk’s job involved coordinating coalition action to stabilize liberated areas, counter propaganda and prevent the movement of funds and fighters.

  WSJ