President Donald Trump on Monday said that the fight against the ISIL terror group was not over and that withdrawal would be done in a “prudent” manner.
“We will be leaving at a proper pace while at the same time continuing to fight ISIS and doing all else that is prudent and necessary!” Trump tweeted.
The president has come under withering pressure at home and in allied capitals after previous statements indicating that he considered the ISIL group vanquished and wanted US troops out of Syria imminently.
Trump’s new statement follows a trip by his national security adviser John Bolton to the Zionist entity in which he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday that withdrawal would not happen before “ISIL is defeated and not able to revive itself.”
The reassurances followed a diplomatic storm caused by Trump’s surprise announcement in December that appeared to signal a rapid withdrawal from Syria.
“We’ve won against ISIS,” he said at the time. “We’ve beaten them and we’ve beaten them badly. We’ve taken back the land. And now it’s time for our troops to come back home.”
Source: AFP
