US President Donald Trump took to Twitter earlier this week to announce that Defense Secretary James Mattis would resign on 28 February 2019.

Pentagon chief Jim Mattis’s departure from the White House was spurred by a phone conversation between Donald Trump and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in which POTUS decided to withdraw troops from Syria, The Associated Press reported, citing two US officials and a Turkish official briefed on the matter.

According to the insiders, the call took place on 14 December – just a day after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu agreed to have the two presidents discuss Erdogan’s threats to kick off a military operation against US-backed Kurdish militia in Syria.

The sources claim that Trump, who previously convinced his Turkish counterpart not to put US troops at risk, made a U-turn, thus siding with Erdogan, while Pompeo, Mattis and other national security officials tried to talk him out of it.

“The talking points were very firm. Everybody said push back and try to offer [Turkey] something that’s a small win, possibly holding territory on the border, something like that”, one of the sources told AP.

Erdogan allegedly reminded Trump that he had on multiple occasions said that the only reason for US troops to maintain a presence in Syria was to crush ISIL, and that the terrorist group had been 99 percent defeated.

Source: Sputnik