Trump says the US is leaving Syria 'very soon': 'Let the other people take care of it'

Source: Washington Examiner | March 29, 2018 | Steven Nelson

President Trump said Thursday the U.S. would leave Syria “very soon” and “let the other people take care of it.”

Trump made the announcement in an Ohio speech pushing spending on domestic infrastructure, and after heralding the Islamic State group’s near-defeat.

“By the way we’re knocking the hell out of ISIS. We’re coming out of Syria very soon. Let the other people take care of it now — very soon, very soon, we’re coming out,” Trump said.

“We’ll have 100 percent of the caliphate as they call it, sometimes referred to as land, we are taking it all back quickly, quickly. We’re going to be coming out of there real soon, going back to our country where we belong, where we want to be,” he said.

Trump’s remarks echo his campaign-trail denunciations of U.S. involvement in the long-running Syrian civil war, now in its eighth year. During the campaign he frequently denounced the Obama administration’s policy of arming rebels, some of them Islamist groups.

Trump’s announced withdrawal comes as hundreds of U.S. troops remain embedded with a Kurdish-dominated military alliance in northern Syria and a pocket of Arab rebels in southeast Syria.

The U.S. presence in Kurdish-dominated areas has deterred military action by Turkey, which invaded a small Kurdish-controlled area of northwest Syria this year to oust U.S.-allied fighters.

The announced departure comes after the replacement national security adviser H.R. McMaster, who said this month that the U.S. was in no rush to leave Syria, with former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.

“We have made immense progress alongside allies and partners over the past year, but we have more work to do,” McMaster said on March 15. “The United States will continue to pursue these murderers until ISIS is fully defeated, population centers are stabilized and refugees can safely return home.”

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