oh, you thought since hurricane trump is president his orders would be obeyed? but then you forgot who really rules here as the following will make a bit more clear;
After approaching two months of talk of a "full" and "immediate" US
troop withdrawal from Syria, first ordered by President Trump on
December 19 — which was predictably met with swift and fierce pushback from beltway hawks including in some cases his own advisers — it now appears the death knell has sounded on the prior "complete" and "rapid" draw down order.
Trump said in a CBS "Face the Nation" interview
this weekend that some unspecified number of US troops will remain in
the region, mostly in Iraq, with possibly some still in Syria, in order "to protect Israel" in what appears a significant backtrack from his prior insistence on an absolute withdrawal.
“We’re going to be there and we’re going to be staying. We have to protect Israel,” he replied
when pressed by CBS reporter Margaret Brennan. “We have to protect
other things that we have. But we’re – yeah, they’ll be coming back in a
matter of time.” He did note that “ultimately some will be coming
home.”
“Look, we’re protecting the world,” he
added. “We’re spending more money than anybody’s ever spent in history,
by a lot.” Trump's slow drift and change in tune on the subject of a
promised "rapid" exit comes after Israeli officials led by Prime
Minister Netanyahu alongside neocon allies in Washington argued that
some 200 US troops in Syria's southeast desert along the Iraqi border
and its 55-kilometer “deconfliction zone” at al-Tanf are the last line of defense against Iranian expansion in Syria, and therefore must stay indefinitely.
“I want to be able to watch Iran,” Trump said further during the CBS interview. “Iran is a real problem.” He
explained that “99%” of ISIS’s territory had been liberated but that a
contingency of US troops must remain to prevent a resurgent Islamic
State as well as to counter Iranian influence, for which American forces
must remain in Iraq as well.
“When I took over, Syria was infested with ISIS. It was all over the
place. And now you have very little ISIS, and you have the caliphate
almost knocked out,” the president said. “We will be announcing in the
not too distant future 100% of the caliphate, which is the area – the
land – the area – 100. We’re at 99% right now. We’ll be at 100.”
However Trump's invoking Iranian influence as a rationale for staying further contradicts his prior December statement that the defeat of ISIS was "the only reason" he was in Syria in the first place. ...............https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-02-03/death-knell-syria-pullout-we-have-protect-israel-says-trump
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