According to Reuters, U.S. Army General Joseph Votel, who oversees U.S. troops in the Middle East as the head of Central Command, estimated that more than 90 percent of the group’s territory in Syria had been taken back from the militants since 2014.
Worries Over Withdrawing All U.S. Forces
Trump’s talk of leaving Syria soon contradicts “everything that he has said his foreign policy would stand for — except for his resistance to getting involved in new foreign wars,” Charles Lister, director of the Extremism and Counterterrorism Program at the Middle East Institute told Bloomberg Politics.
Lister said a U.S. withdrawal would be seen as “empowering Iran further in the Middle East, not weakening it.”
Trump’s advisers have encouraged him to keep a small force in Syria to ensure the militants are defeated.
However, it sounds like Trump is ready to withdraw all U.S. forces.
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