Alwaght- US President Donald Trump has once again claimed on Thursday that American forces would leave Syria "very soon" and "let the other people take care of it".
“We’re knocking the hell out of ISIS. We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now. Very soon, very soon, we're coming out. We're going to have 100 percent of the caliphate, as they call it--sometimes referred to as land. We're taking it all back--quickly, quickly,” the president said during an event in Ohio.
Trump has also suggested that US should have kept Iraq’s oil rather than helping the West Asian state build schools.
"We build a school. They blow it up. We build a school, they blow it up. You know what we have for it? Nothing… I used to say, keep the oil! If we kept the oil, we would have been okay. If we kept the oil, we wouldn't have ISIS! They kept the oil, we didn't keep the oil. Stupid! Stupid!"
Trump has already claimed that American troops' mission in Syria was limited to destroying ISIS terrorist group.
"We're there for one reason: to get ISIS and get rid of ISIS and to go home," he said on 23 February during a press conference with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. "We're not there for any other reason."
Trump’s remarks, however, contradicts his own administration officials who seek to maintain an open-ended military presence in the West Asian country.
In January, the ousted US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson outlined defeating ISIS and Al-Qaeda ‒ as only one of the five goals the US was pursuing in Syria. The others? Curbing Iranian influence and eliminating weapons of mass destruction, ending the civil war and creating conditions for safe return of refugees, as well as ensuring a peaceful transfer to a “post-Assad leadership.”
In Tillerson’s vision, the majority of Syrian people would peacefully vote out President Bashar Assad in a free election. The Obama administration and its allies had repeatedly insisted that “Assad must go,” which the Trump administration has alternately agreed and disagreed with.
In December, a Pentagon spokesman acknowledged the presence of almost 2,000 US troops in Syria, and said they will remain there for “as long as we need to.”
The Syrian government has consistently called the US military presence in Syria "illegal" as it is without Permission of Damascus or a UN mandate.
