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Macron criticized Trump for his abrupt Syria withdrawal, saying 'an ally should be dependable'

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Emmanuel Macron Donald Trump

  • French President Emmanuel Macron slammed US President Donald Trump over his decision to withdraw from Syria and suggested he was mistreating his allies.
  • "To be allies is to fight shoulder to shoulder," he said. "An ally should be dependable."
  • Trump abruptly announced last week that he was pulling all 2,000 US troops from Syria, going against own State Department policy and sparking backlash from both parties and lawmakers.
  • The withdrawal was reportedly the last straw for Defence Secretary James Mattis, who said in his resignation letter that the US should be "treating allies with respect."

French President Emmanuel Macron slammed President Donald Trump's withdrawal of US troops from Syria and suggested that he was not reliable, saying that "an ally should be dependable."

Trump abruptly announced last week that all 2,000 US troops will be withdrawing from Syria, in a move that was criticised by Democrats, Republicans, lawmakers, and Conservative commentators.

Macron said that he regretted Trump's decision.

"I very deeply regret the decision made on Syria," Macron said in a news conference in Chad, Reuters reported.

"To be allies is to fight shoulder to shoulder. It’s the most important thing for a head of state and head of the military," he said. "An ally should be dependable."

Read More: Trump outright ignored Pentagon, State Department Syria policy in a big win for Putin

Macron also praised the work the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which freed large parts of northern and eastern Syria from ISIS. "I call on everyone ... not to forget what we owe them," he said.

Trump's decision to withdraw was met with alarm across Europe. German foreign minister Heiko Maas in a statement that the threat of ISIS is "not over" and said that Trump's decision "could hurt the fight against the IS and endanger what has been achieved."

Trump's decision is a move that many of the president's advisers had warned against, and it was reportedly the final straw for Defence Secretary James Mattis, who has announced his resignation last week. 

In his resignation letter, Mattis said that the US should be "treating allies with respect."

Read More: US Defense Secretary James Mattis left a stark message for his successor in his resignation letter: Wake up and smell the threat

Brett McGurk, the top US official leading the fight against ISIS, resigned early over Trump's decision. He told his colleagues in an email obtained by The New York Timesthat he could not in good conscience carry out Trump's orders.

"The recent decision by the president came as a shock and was a complete reversal of policy that was articulated to us," he wrote.

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The Marine Corps commandant says he has 'no idea' about details of troop withdrawals

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Marine Corps commandant Rober Neller Marines Afghanistan

The Commandant of the Marine Corps says he has “no idea” on whether or when troops will be withdrawing from Afghanistan or Syria, according to The Wall Street Journal.

While visiting his troops in Afghanistan, Gen. Robert Neller was asked by a Marine about Trump’s recent order to withdraw all troops from Syria and about half from Afghanistan, according to a report by the Journal’s Ben Kesling.

Relaying what many of their family members were asking, the junior Marine was wondering, hey sir, are we about to go home?

“That’s a really good question. And the honest answer is I have no idea,” Neller answered. To another gathering of Marines, the four-star general said, “I don’t think anybody really knows exactly what’s going to happen. I’ve read the same stuff in the newspaper you did, I have a little more knowledge than that, but not a whole lot more.”

Marines in Afghanistan

The Trump administration ordered the military to withdraw about 7,000 troops from Afghanistan “in the coming months,” The New York Times reported Thursday, citing two defense officials. But that word hasn’t yet seemed to have trickled down to troops downrange, many of whom have been reading news reports of a potential hasty exit from Syria, Afghanistan, and the abrupt resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis— all in the span of a week.

Neller indeed tried to reassure the Marines that they needed to “focus on their mission” in Afghanistan, while intimating that he still hadn’t been given specifics by the White House, a senior defense official told Task & Purpose.

Meanwhile, the Journal reported that neither Navy Secretary Richard Spencer or Gen. Austin Miller, the top commander of all NATO forces in Afghanistan, had received official orders from the White House or Pentagon on the drawdown.

There are roughly 14,000 US troops still in Afghanistan. A spokesman for the Resolute Support mission did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Task & Purpose.

SEE ALSO: These were the world's 15 weakest militaries in 2018

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Jim Mattis' brother says he had 'no anger' about being forced out by Trump

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James Mattis and Donald Trump

  • Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned this month, reportedly in response to the decision to withdraw from Syria.
  • President Donald Trump initially heralded Mattis, saying he would leave at the end of February.
  • But Trump reportedly grew angry and pushed the Pentagon chief out early.

The phone call Tom Mattis got from Jim Mattis on Sunday morning wasn't a pleasant one, but he said his younger brother was "unruffled" by President Donald Trump's decision to force him out early, the elder Mattis told The Seattle Times.

"He was very calm about the whole thing. Very matter of fact. No anger," Tom Mattis told The Seattle Times. "As I have said many times in other circumstances, Jim knows who he is … many more Americans (now) know his character."

Jim Mattis announced his resignation as defense secretary on December 20, reportedly prompted in large part by Trump's decision to withdraw the roughly 2,000 US troops deployed to Syria.

Read More: Here's how Donald Trump took shots at NATO in 2018 — and it spurred Jim Mattis to quit in protest

Mattis went to the White House that day in an effort to get Trump to keep US forces in the war-torn country. Mattis "was rebuffed, and told the president that he was resigning as a result," The New York Times said at the time.

James Mattis

Trump initially reacted to Mattis' resignation gracefully, tweeting that the defense chief and retired Marine general would be "retiring, with distinction, at the end of February," echoing Mattis' resignation letter.

But Trump reportedly bridled at coverage of Mattis and his letter, which was widely interpreted as a rebuke of Trump and of the president's worldview.

Read More: 'Is there nothing to stop this guy?': Here are the checks that are left on Trump's military power

On December 23, Trump abruptly announced that Mattis would leave office two months early, sending Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to tell Mattis of the change. Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan will take over the top civilian job at the Pentagon in an acting capacity.

Trump's sudden move to push Mattis out was reportedly a retaliatory measure, but Mattis evinced no ire over it when he told his older brother on Sunday.

botlon mattis

The Mattises are natives of Richland, Washington. Tom, who was also a Marine, still lives there, as does their 96-year-old mother, Lucille.

Read More: The Coast Guard turned down a request for an Arctic exercise out of concern the US's only heavy icebreaker would break down and Russia would have to rescue it

Tom said his brother was faithful to the Constitution and would always speak truth to power "regardless of the consequences."

"No one should assume that his service to his country will end. And the manner of his departure is yet another service to the nation. It is the very definition of patriotism and integrity," Tom Mattis added.

James Mattis, U.S. Secretary of Defense, speaks with troops from the 56th Multifunctional Medical Battalion, 62nd Medical Brigade at Base Camp Donna in Donna, Texas, U.S., November 14, 2018.

Jim Mattis — who checks in with their mother almost daily, Tom Mattis said — had no plans to return home from Christmas, according to the elder Mattis, hoping instead to visit troops in the Middle East.

But Trump's announcement appeared to forestall that trip.

Read More:H.R. McMaster reportedly called Trump out for asking about taking Iraq's oil

On December 19, a day before his resignation, Mattis released a holiday message to US service members, telling them "thanks for keeping the faith."

On December 24, Mattis signed an order withdrawing US troops from Syria, the Defense Department said, though a timeline and specific details are still being worked on. On Christmas Day, Mattis was reportedly in his office at the Pentagon.

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Trump says he has 'no plans at all' to withdraw US troops from Iraq during his first visit to troops in a combat zone

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President Trump Melania visit troops Christmas Iraq selfie

  • President Donald Trump made a surprise trip to visit US troops in Iraq on Wednesday.
  • While there he said he has "no plans at all" to withdraw troops from the country.
  • Last week, he abruptly announced he was pulling troops out of Syria and Afghanistan.

During a surprise trip to Iraq, his first such visit with US troops in a combat zone, President Donald Trump says he has "no plans at all" to withdraw US forces from the country, where they've been present since the 2003 invasion.

Trump had not previously said he would pull US troops from Iraq, but the trip comes after he abruptly announced the withdrawal of some 2,000 US troops from Syria — a decision that reportedly prompted Defense Secretary Jim Mattis' resignation — and reports emerged of plans to remove about half of the 14,000 US troops in Afghanistan.

Mattis, who will leave office at the end of the year, signed an order to withdraw troops from Syria on December 24.

Trump, accompanied by his wife, Melania, traveled to Iraq late on Christmas night, flying to Al Asad air base in western Iraq and delivering a holiday message to more than 5,000 US troops stationed in the country. He is expected to make two stops on the trip, according to The New York Times.

President Trump Melania visit troops Christmas Iraq American Flag

The trip was kept secret, with Air Force One reportedly making the 11-hour flight with lights off and window shades drawn. Trump said he had never seen anything like it and that he was more concerned with the safety of those with him than he was for himself, according to the Associated Press.

The president said that because of gains made against ISIS in Syria, US forces there were able to return home. US officials have said the militant group holds about 1% of the territory it once occupied, though several thousand fighters remain in pockets in western Syria and others have blended back into local populations.

Trump said the mission in Syria was to remove ISIS from its strongholds and not to be a nation-builder, which he said was a job for other wealthy countries. He praised Saudi Arabia this week for committing money to rebuild the war-torn country. The US presence there was never meant to be "open-ended," he added.

Trump told reporters traveling with him that he wanted to remove US forces from Syria but that Iraq could still be used as a base to launch attacks on ISIS militants.

If needed, the US can attack ISIS "so fast and so hard" that they "won't know what the hell happened," Trump said.

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NOW WATCH: What the US needs to do to prevent a new ISIS in Iraq

Trump says 'the generals' asked for more time in Syria, but he said 'Nope' because 'We've knocked them silly'

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Trump Iraq

  • President Donald Trump made an unannounced visit to US troops in Iraq on the day after Christmas.
  • It was Trump's first visit with US troops in a combat zone since taking office.
  • While on the ground, Trump described his reasoning for abruptly pulling US troops out of neighboring Syria.

President Donald Trump said during a surprise trip to Iraq that he had denied a request from military leaders to extend the US deployment in Syria because the Islamic militant group ISIS had been knocked "silly."

Trump arrived in Iraq for his first visit to a combat zone as president on Wednesday night, after a secretive 11-hour flight to Al Asad air base, west of Baghdad, where he addressed the more than 5,000 US troops stationed in Iraq.

After arriving just after 7:15 pm local time, Trump and first lady Melania Trump met with advisers and other officials for a briefing, after which he made remarks and took questions from reporters.

President Trump Melania visit troops Christmas Iraq selfie

Asked about the withdrawal from Syria, which Trump announced abruptly last week, the president said he had given "the generals" several six-month "extensions" to get out of the war-torn country.

"They said again, recently, can we have more time? I said, 'Nope.' You can’t have any more time. You’ve had enough time. We’ve knocked them out. We’ve knocked them silly," Trump said, according to a pool report.

Read more: Trump says he has 'no plans at all' to withdraw US troops from Iraq during his first visit to troops in a combat zone

Trump said the US presence in Syria was not meant to be "open-ended" and that Iraq could still be used as a base to strike the militants if needed. The US could attack ISIS "so fast and so hard" they "won't know what the hell happened," he said.

Trump campaigned on reducing the US military presence abroad, but in office he agreed to expand and extend that presence, though he had not previously discussed pulling troops from Iraq and said he had "no plans at all" to do so.

U.S. Army Soldiers with the 3rd Cavalry Regiment fire artillery alongside Iraqi Security Force artillery at known ISIS locations near the Iraqi-Syrian border, June 5, 2018.

The sudden decision to pull some 2,000 US troops from Syria reportedly came after a conversation with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who questioned the US's continued presence there. (Erdogan has bristled at the US' partnership with Kurdish fighters in Syria, who Ankara views as terrorists.)

Trump's advisers, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, prepared talking points for him to use with Erdogan, but during the call Trump discarded them. The decision to withdraw reportedly prompted Mattis' resignation.

Read more: Even Turkey's president told Trump not to do anything hasty in Syria

"I will tell you that I’ve had some very good talks with President Erdogan who wants to knock them out also and he'll do it," Trump said, according to a pool report. "And others will do it to. Because we are in their region. They should be sharing the burden of costs and they're not."

"The United States cannot continue to be the policeman of the world," he added.

President Trump Melania visit troops Christmas Iraq American Flag

Earlier this week, Trump praised Saudi Arabia for committing money to help rebuild Syria, which has been riven by a seven-year-long civil war. On Wednesday, he again complimented Riyadh for its involvement.

"In Syria, Erdogan said he wants to knock out ISIS, whatever's left, the remnants of ISIS. And Saudi Arabia just came out and said they are going to pay for some economic development, which is great. That means we don't have to pay," Trump said, according to a pool report.

"We are spread out all over the world," he added. "We are in countries most people haven’t even heard about. Frankly, it's ridiculous."

After taking questions, Trump entered the base dining facility, where more than 100 service members greeted him with applause. Trump shook hands and spoke with the troops, signing several "Make America Great Again" hats and a patch with "TRUMP 2020" written on it.

At one point, after speaking with a service member, he turned to reporters and said, "He came back into the military because of me."

Turning back to the service member, Trump said: "And I am here because of you."

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NOW WATCH: Here’s what it was like to live in a city controlled by ISIS

US military says it's responsible for killing 1,139 civilians in its fight against ISIS — but others estimate much higher numbers

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Children watch as soldier stands guard outside of Damascus, Syria.

  • The US military says it is responsible for inadvertently killing 1,139 civilians in its fight against ISIS since August 2014, but many argue they're underestimating.
  • The report also states that 12 were killed in a May 2017 strike on Mosul.
  • Other estimates are significantly higher, placing the civilian death toll in the US' fight against ISIS closer to at least 7,000.

 

The US military says it is responsible for inadvertently killing 1,139 civilians in its fight against ISIS since August 2014, but many argue they're underestimating, according to a report from Defense One's Kevin Baron.

The US Central Command announced internally Sunday that 1,139 civilians have been inadvertently killed in its fight against the Islamic State since August 2014, in 31,406 airstrikes. 

The report also states 12 were killed in a May 2017 strike on a Mosul bomb-making facility from a secondary explosion. When the Mosul strike happened in May 2017, BBC reported that 105 civilians were killed.

Estimates from other organizations place the civilian death toll in the Middle East exponentially higher than CentCom estimates.

Airwars, a non-profit organization that tracks civilian deaths in Syria, Libya, and Iraq, estimated that between 7,316–11,637 civilians have been killed in Syria and Iraq by US-led actions.

Read more:Civilian deaths in Afghanistan hit record as suicide attacks surge

Other reports show similar estimates. The Syrian Network for Human Rights estimated in October that 6,395 civilians have been killed in Syria in 2018 alone.

In June, U.S. Army Col. Thomas Veale, a spokesman for the US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, said no one will ever truly know the number of civilian deaths that have occurred.

“As far as how do we know how many civilians were killed, I am just being honest, no one will ever know,” Veale said in a briefing at the Pentagon by video link from Baghdad. “Anyone who claims they will know is lying, and there’s no possible way.” 

US Central Command did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment. 

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Lindsey Graham suggests Trump may have changed his mind on pulling troops out of Syria: 'I think the president's going to finish the job when it comes to ISIS'

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lindsey graham

  • Senator Lindsey Graham may have changed President Trump's mind about pulling troops out of Syria. 
  • "I think the president's going to finish the job when it comes to ISIS," Graham told reporters after meeting with President Trump Sunday.
  • Trump's decision earlier this month to order his staff to execute the "full" and "rapid" withdrawal of US military from Syria was met with harsh criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike.

"We are in a pause situation,"  said Senator Lindsey Graham on pulling out US troops from Syria.

After a White House lunch with President Trump, Graham indicated that Trump may have changed his mind on on the highly criticized decision to pull out of Syria

"I think the president's going to finish the job when it comes to ISIS," Graham said.  

Staying in Syria would be a change from Trump's plan to pull out completely, which he has defended over the last two weeks. Graham told reporters on Sunday afternoon, "He [President Trump] told me some things I didn’t know that made me feel a lot better about where we're headed in Syria." 

Trump's decision earlier this month to order his staff to execute the "full" and "rapid" withdrawal of US military from Syria was met with harsh criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike. Hours after the announcement, Graham took to the Senate floor to call Trump's decision "dishonorable" and "a stain on the honor of the United States."

Read more: Trump says he has 'no plans at all' to withdraw US troops from Iraq during his first visit to troops in a combat zone

"We need to keep our troops there. They're inside the ten-yard line in defeating ISIS, but we're not there yet. If we leave now, the Kurds are going to get slaughtered,"Graham told CNN's Dana Bash on Sunday morning.

After meeting with President Trump at a White House lunch, Graham told reporters, "We’re slowing things down in a smart way.” 

"We still have some differences," Graham acknowledge, "but I will tell you that the president is thinking long and hard about Syria — how to withdraw our forces but at the same time achieve our national security interests."

SEE ALSO: Retired four-star Gen. Stanley McChrystal criticizes President Trump's behavior: 'I don't think he tells the truth'

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Trump bashes 'failed Generals' in a barrage of tweets on New Year's Eve

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donald trump

  • President Donald Trump fired off a series of tweets on Monday morning lambasting critics.
  • He appeared to be responding to criticism of his decision to withdraw US troops from Syria.
  • Trump has backed away from his claim that the terrorist group ISIS had been defeated, and it's unclear whether or when US troops will actually be pulled out.

In a flurry of tweets early on New Year's Eve, President Donald Trump lashed out at criticism of his recent decision to withdraw troops from the campaign against the terrorist group ISIS in Syria.

"If anybody but Donald Trump did what I did in Syria, which was an ISIS loaded mess when I became President, they would be a national hero. ISIS is mostly gone, we're slowly sending our troops back home to be with their families, while at the same time fighting ISIS remnants," Trump said in one tweet, again softening his earlier claim that the group had been defeated.

Read more: Trump says he has 'no plans at all' to withdraw US troops from Iraq during his first visit to troops in a combat zone

"I campaigned on getting out of Syria and other places," Trump added. "Now when I start getting out the Fake News Media, or some failed Generals who were unable to do the job before I arrived, like to complain about me & my tactics, which are working. Just doing what I said I was going to do!"

He added in another tweet: "Except the results are FAR BETTER than I ever said they were going to be! I campaigned against the NEVER ENDING WARS, remember!"

Donald Trump

Trump's reference to "failed Generals" appears to be a response to comments by Stanley McChrystal, a 34-year Army veteran and retired general. (Other former US generals have criticized Trump in recent days; John Kelly, the outgoing White House chief of staff and retired Marine general, differed with Trump on some issues in an interview this weekend.)

In an interview on Sunday with ABC, McChrystal said he didn't think Trump "tells the truth" and, when asked if he thought Trump was immoral, said, "I think he is."

McChrystal was head of Joint Special Operations Command from 2003 to 2008, overseeing the effort to kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Read more: What Stanley McChrystal learned from Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq before leading the operation to kill him

McChrystal took command of forces in Afghanistan in summer 2009 but was relieved in mid-2010 after some of his staff members were quoted as disparaging senior US civilian officials in a Rolling Stone story. He was also criticized for his handling of the death of Pat Tillman, an NFL player who became an Army Ranger and was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in 2004.

In the ABC interview, McChrystal was asked about the withdrawal of some 2,000 US troops from Syria, where they have been assisting partner forces fighting ISIS.

US Marines Syria Operation Inherent Resolve

Describing a renewed Russian presence and an increased Iranian presence in the region, McChrystal said a US pullout would be likely to lead to more instability, "and of course it'll be much more difficult for the United States to try to push events in any direction."

"There's an argument that says we just pull up our stuff, go home, let the region run itself," McChrystal added. "That has not done well for the last 50 or 60 years."

Read more: Jim Mattis' brother says he had 'no anger' about being forced out by Trump

"I don't believe ISIS is defeated," he said when asked about the group. "I think ISIS is as much an idea as it is a number of ISIS fighters. There's a lot of intelligence that says there are actually more ISIS fighters around the world now than there were a couple of years ago."

That lingering presence didn't mean the US and its partners hadn't done well against the group in Iraq and Syria, he added, "but ISIS is an idea, and as long as the fertile ground exists — the causes that cause people to flock to a movement as extreme as ISIS exists — you're going to have it flare back up again."

Trump says the US can't be the 'policeman' of the world

Stanley McChrystal Charles Duhigg

Trump's decision to withdraw US troops from Syria was announced suddenly on December 19, and he was widely criticized for the move.

Even those opposed to a protracted US presence in Syria or who were supportive US withdrawal took issue with the apparent haste of the decision, which is said to have come as a surprise to US officials and allies.

Read more: Trump says 'the generals' asked for more time in Syria, but he said 'Nope' because 'We've knocked them silly'

Trump has said that the US can't "be the policeman of the world" and that the presence in Syria was not meant to be "open-ended." During a surprise trip to Iraq the day after Christmas, Trump said "the generals" had asked him for more time in Syria and that he told them "nope" because "we've knocked them silly."

The decision also appeared to be the final straw for Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who announced his resignation days afterward.

What ultimately happens with US personnel in Syria remains unclear, however. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham on Sunday said he had met with Trump and characterized the withdrawal as being "in a pause situation."

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10 global conflicts and tensions to watch in 2019

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syria protest

  • As the West’s influence declines, accelerated by U.S. President Donald Trump’s contempt for traditional allies and Europe’s struggles with Brexit and nativism, leaders across the world are probing and prodding to see how far they can go.
  • Many of those leaders embrace a noxious brew of nationalism and authoritarianism.  The wind is in the sails of strongmen worldwide.
  • Some of the areas to pay the most attention to in 2019 include Nigeria, Venezuela, Cameroon, Ukraine, and South Sudan. 
  • Additionally, it's important to watch Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, and the US-China, and US-Saudi Arabia-Iran relations. 

In a world with fewer rules, the only truly effective one is knowing what you can get away with. The answer today, it turns out, is: quite a lot.

As the era of largely uncontested U.S. primacy fades, the international order has been thrown into turmoil. More leaders are tempted more often to test limits, jostle for power, and seek to bolster their influence—or diminish that of their rivals—by meddling in foreign conflicts. 

Multilateralism and its constraints are under siege, challenged by more transactional, zero-sum politics.  Instruments of collective action, such as the United Nations Security Council, are paralyzed; those of collective accountability, including the International Criminal Court, are ignored and disparaged.

Nostalgia can be deceptive. Too fond a portrayal of the era of Western hegemony would be misleading. Iraq’s chemical weapons use against Iran in the 1980s; the 1990s bloodletting in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Somalia; the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; Sri Lanka’s brutal 2009 campaign against the Tamils; and the collapse of Libya and South Sudan: all these happened at a time of—in some cases because of—U.S. dominance and a reasonably coherent West.

A liberal and nominally rules-based order hardly stopped those setting the rules from discarding them when they saw fit. The erosion of Western influence, in short, looks different from Moscow, Beijing, and the developing world than it does from Brussels, London, or Washington.

Trump UN

Still, for better and for worse, U.S. power and alliances have for years shaped international affairs, set limits, and structured regional orders.

As the West’s influence declines, accelerated by U.S. President Donald Trump’s contempt for traditional allies and Europe’s struggles with Brexit and nativism, leaders across the world are probing and prodding to see how far they can go.

In their domestic policies, many of those leaders embrace a noxious brew of nationalism and authoritarianism.

The mix varies from place to place but typically entails rejection of international institutions and rules. There is little new in the critique of an unjust global order.

But if once that critique tended to be rooted in international solidarity, today it stems chiefly from an inward-looking populism that celebrates narrow social and political identity, vilifies minorities and migrants, assails the rule of law and independence of the press, and elevates national sovereignty above all else.

Trump may be the most visible of the genre, but he is far from the most extreme. The wind is in the sails of strongmen worldwide. They realize, at times perhaps to their surprise, that constraints are crumbling, and the behavior that results often fuels violence or crises.

Rohingya refugee

Myanmar’s mass expulsion of 700,000 Rohingya, the Syrian regime’s brutal suppression of a popular uprising, the Cameroonian government’s apparent determination to crush an Anglophone insurgency rather than tackle the grievances fueling it, the Venezuelan government’s economic warfare against its own people, and the silencing of dissent in Turkey, Egypt, and elsewhere are but a few examples.

All are motivated in part by what leaders perceive as a yellow light where they used to see solid red.

Beyond their borders, these leaders test norms, too. Having annexed parts of Georgia and Crimea and stoked separatist violence in Ukraine’s Donbass region, Russia is now throwing its weight around in the Sea of Azov, poisoning dissidents in the United Kingdom, and subverting Western democracies with cyberwarfare.

China obstructs freedom of navigation in the South China Sea and arbitrarily detains Canadian citizens—including the International Crisis Group’s Michael Kovrig.

Saudi Arabia has pushed the envelope with the war in Yemen, the kidnapping of a Lebanese prime minister, and the gruesome murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in its consulate in Istanbul. Iran plots attacks against dissidents on European soil.

Gaza Strip protests Palestine Palestinians Israel Hamas protest 3

Israel feels emboldened to undermine ever more systematically the foundations of a possible two-state solution.

Such actions are hardly new or equal in magnitude. But they are more brazen and overt.

They have this much in common: They start with the assumption that there will be few consequences for breaches of international norms.

The U.S. government has hardly been an innocent bystander.

Trump’s disdain for human rights and penchant for transactional diplomacy have set a strikingly negative tone. So too has his flouting of America’s international commitments: tearing up the Iran nuclear deal and, worse, threatening to impose economic punishment on those who choose to abide by it; hinting he will leave the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty if U.S. demands are not met rather than working within it to press Russia to comply; and signaling, through attacks on the International Criminal Court and chest-thumping speeches about U.S. sovereignty, that Washington regards its actions and those of its friends as beyond accountability.

The danger of today’s free-for-all goes beyond the violence already generated. The larger risk is of miscalculation.

Overreach by one leader convinced of his immunity may prompt an unexpected reaction by another; the ensuing tit for tat easily could escalate without the presence of a credible, willing outside power able to play the role of arbiter.

Putin

True, not everyone gets away with everything all the time. Bangladesh seemed poised to forcibly return some Rohingya refugees to Myanmar but stopped, almost certainly in response to international pressure. The feared Russian-backed reconquest of Idlib, the last rebel stronghold in Syria, has, for now, been averted, in no small measure due to Turkish, European, and U.S. objections.

The same is true (again: for the time being) when it comes to a potential Saudi-led offensive on the Yemeni port of Hodeidah, with Riyadh and Abu Dhabi largely deterred by warnings about the humanitarian impact and cost to their international standing.

Elsewhere, leaders anticipating impunity have been taken aback by the severity of the response: Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example, by the stiff sanctions and show of united resolve that Western powers have maintained since Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and the killing of its former agent on British soil; Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman by the outrage that followed Khashoggi’s murder.

Overall, though, it is hard to escape the sense that these are exceptions that prove the absence of rules. The international order as we know it is unraveling, with no clear sense of what will come in its wake. The danger may well lie less in the ultimate destination than in the process of getting there. As the following list of 10 Conflicts to Watch in 2019 amply illustrates, that road will be bumpy, and it will be perilous.

1. Yemen

If one place has borne the brunt of international lawlessness over the past year it is Yemen.

The humanitarian crisis there—the world’s worst—could deteriorate further in 2019 if the key players do not seize the opportunity created over the past weeks by U.N. Special Envoy Martin Griffiths in achieving a partial cease-fire and encouraging a series of confidence-building steps.

After more than four years of war and a Saudi-led siege, almost 16 million Yemenis face “severe acute food insecurity,” according to the U.N.

That means one in two Yemenis doesn’t have enough to eat.

Fighting started in late 2014, after Houthi rebels expelled the internationally recognized government from the capital. It escalated the following March, when Saudi Arabia, together with the United Arab Emirates, began bombing and blockading Yemen, aiming to reverse the Houthis’ gains and reinstall the dislodged government. Western powers largely endorsed the Saudi-led campaign.

In late 2018, Yemeni militias backed by the United Arab Emirates surrounded Hodeidah, a Houthi-controlled port, through which aid for millions of starving Yemenis passes. The coalition appeared determined to move in, convinced that taking the port would crush the rebellion and make the Houthis more pliant.

But the consequences of such an offensive would be almost unimaginable. The top U.N. relief official, Mark Lowcock, has warned it could provoke a “great big famine.” That, and the fallout from Khashoggi’s murder, prompted Western powers to begin restraining the Gulf coalition. On Nov. 9, the United States announced it would no longer refuel coalition jets conducting air raids in Yemen.

A month later, Griffiths, with Washington’s help, reached the “Stockholm agreement” between the Houthis and the Yemeni government, including a fragile cease-fire around Hodeidah.

There are other glimmers of light. U.S. pressure to end the conflict could intensify in 2019. The Senate has already voted to consider legislation barring all U.S. involvement in the war.

Once the Democrats assume control of the House of Representatives in January 2019, they could move more aggressively in this direction.

That and more will be needed to end the Yemen war or at least avoid it taking another turn for the worse. All parties—the Houthis and their Yemeni adversaries, but also the Saudis and Emiratis—seem to believe that time is on their side. Only pressure from Europe, Oman, and Iran on the Houthis; from the United States on Saudi Arabia and the UAE; from those two Gulf countries on the Yemeni government; and from Congress on the U.S. administration stands a chance of making a difference.



2. Afghanistan

If Yemen is the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, Afghanistan suffers its deadliest fighting. In 2018, by one tally, the war killed more than 40,000 combatants and civilians.

Trump’s reported decision in mid-December that half of U.S. forces in Afghanistan would leave brought further unease.

In principle, Washington’s signal that it is ready to pull out could advance diplomatic efforts to end the war by focusing belligerents’ and regional actors’ minds. But the ad hoc nature of the decision—seemingly made without looping in top officials—and the specter it raises of the United States cutting and running could bode badly for the coming year.

In 2018, the war exacted a higher toll than at any time since the Taliban were ousted from Kabul more than 17 years ago.

A three-day cease-fire in June, which the Taliban and the government enforced and which prompted joyous celebration by fighters and civilians alike, offered a short respite, though fighting resumed immediately afterwards.

Taliban fighters now effectively control perhaps half the country, cutting off transport routes and laying siege to cities and towns.

A sharp uptick in U.S. airstrikes has not curbed their momentum.

In September, Washington appointed the veteran diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad as an envoy for peace talks—a welcome sign that it was prioritizing negotiations to end the war. Taliban leaders appear to be taking the talks seriously, though the process is stuck over their continued insistence that the United States commit to a timeline for full withdrawal of international forces as a precondition for a wider peace process involving other Afghan factions, a sequence that would be a win for the Taliban while saddling other Afghans with uncertainty.

Only days after Khalilzad’s latest talks with the Taliban came Trump’s bombshell. Withdrawing 7,000 troops in itself will probably not be militarily decisive. Indeed, there could be value to the United States making clear it is serious about bringing troops home.

All sides understand that a rapid pullout could provoke a major new civil war, an outcome nobody, including the Taliban, wants. With a U.S. drawdown in the cards, the Taliban’s suspicion about Washington’s motives might ease, propelling talks forward.

Neighboring countries and others involved in Afghanistan—notably Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and China—all want the Americans out eventually, but none of them wants a precipitous withdrawal. They may be more inclined to support U.S. diplomacy if they believe that Washington will eventually give up its strategic foothold in South Asia.

Trump’s announcement could therefore spur them to help end the war, but regional powers could just as easily increase their meddling by doubling down on Afghan proxies to hedge their bets.

Unfortunately, the rashness of Trump’s decision risks outweighing any potential silver lining. Its timing appeared to catch everyone—from Khalilzad and top U.S. military chiefs to the Afghan government—off guard. The fact that it was not coordinated with Khalilzad meant that the envoy could not extract any concessions from the Taliban in return for such a key pledge that partially addressed their core demand. In Kabul, the sense of betrayal was palpable.

A few days later, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani nominated two hard-line anti-Taliban officials as his defense and interior ministers, suggesting a move away from his compromising tone of the past year.

The festivities that greeted the June cease-fire revealed broad support for peace, and there are signs that the war’s core protagonists are open to a settlement. But that was always an uncertain bet. Trump’s decision has only added to the uncertainty.



3. U.S.-Chinese Tensions

The standoff between China and the United States is not a deadly conflict, no matter how bitter the trade war between Washington and Beijing has become.

Still, rhetoric between the two is increasingly bellicose. If relations, already at their lowest ebb since the Tiananmen protests almost three decades ago, continue to deteriorate, the rivalry could have graver geopolitical consequences than all of the other crises listed this year.

In a deeply divided Washington, one position that wins bipartisan consensus is that China is an adversary with which the United States is inexorably locked in strategic competition.

Most U.S. policymakers concur that Beijing has exploited institutions and rules to its own end—joining the World Trade Organization or signing up to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, for example, even as it acts inconsistently with the spirit of both. President Xi Jinping’s ending of term limits, rapid expansion of China’s military, and extension of the Communist Party’s control across state and society confirm to many in Washington the dangerous turn the country has taken under his stewardship.

The U.S. government’s 2018 National Defense Strategy cites 'inter-state strategic competition' as its primary concern, with China and Russia named as primary competitors, after many years in which terrorism took the top spot.

Heightening the sense of lawlessness is Beijing’s unjust detention of three Canadians—including one of my colleagues, the Northeast Asia expert Michael Kovrig—widely seen as a tit for tat for Canada’s arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, wanted for Iran sanctions violations by the United States, with which Canada has an extradition treaty.

In reality, China likely has no short-term desire to fundamentally challenge the world order. Nor will it match Washington’s global clout anytime soon, provided the Trump administration takes steps to stop hemorrhaging allies and credibility.

But Beijing is ever readier to throw its weight around in multilateral institutions and its region. In Asia, it expects a Chinese sphere in which neighbors are sovereign but deferential. U.S. policymakers mostly regard such an arrangement as inimical to U.S. alliances and interests.

Mounting U.S.-Chinese tension has implications for conflicts in Asia and beyond. For the two superpowers, pooling efforts to end crises has never been easy. An increasingly bitter rivalry would make it much harder. China would be less likely to back either tougher sanctions against North Korea, if stuttering talks between Washington and Pyongyang break down, or U.S. diplomatic efforts in Afghanistan.

Risks of direct conflict remain slim, but the South China Sea is a troubling flash point.

The past two decades have seen occasional run-ins between Chinese forces and U.S. planes. Beijing stakes claim to 90 percent of the South China Sea, stopping mere miles from the Vietnamese, Malaysian, and Philippine coastlines, and has aggressively built bases on strategic natural and man-made islands.

From Beijing’s perspective, such maneuvers are standard operating procedure for what Xi calls a “big country.”

China wants what the United States has: pliant neighbors, influence around its periphery, and the capacity to control its sea approaches and transport lanes.

Others, of course, see it differently. The smaller Southeast Asian nations object, and some look to Washington for protection.

Beijing and Washington could reach some form of trade deal in the months ahead, which would help ease tensions. But any respite is likely to be short-lived. On both sides, leaders believe a long-festering geopolitical and economic clash has reached a point of rupture.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Trump rants about the government shutdown, stock-market 'glitches,' Tom Cruise, and more during wild Cabinet meeting

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  • President Donald Trump held a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday.
  • He spoke with the press for roughly an hour and a half.
  • Trump discussed the government shutdown, the border wall, incoming Sen. Mitt Romney, the military withdrawal from Syria, former Defense Secretary James Mattis, the stock market, and more.

President Donald Trump kicked off 2019 with a wild, scattershot Cabinet meeting Wednesday that hit on a variety of topics, including funding the long-promised wall on the US-Mexico border and the similarities between US generals and Tom Cruise.

During the roughly hour-and-a-half meeting in the White House, Trump took questions from reporters after a relatively quiet holiday break.

The president weighed in on a variety of topics, including:

  • The government shutdown: Trump said the government should stay shut down until Democrats accept his demands for more than $5 billion in border-wall funding. The shutdown is now in its 12th day, and congressional leaders are set to meet with Trump on Wednesday.
  • His Christmas plans: The president also complained that the shutdown forced him to stay at the White House over Christmas. "I was here on Christmas evening; I was all by myself in the White House," he said. "That's a big, big house. Except for all the guys out on the lawn with machine guns. I was waving to them. I never saw so many guys with machine guns in my life." First lady Melania Trump flew back to the White House to spend Christmas with her husband.
  • The decision to pull troops out of Syria: Trump declined to give a timetable for the withdrawal of troops from Syria but reiterated his decision to do so. "So Syria was lost long ago. It was lost long ago. Besides that, we're talking about sand and death," Trump said. "That's what we're talking about. We're not talking about vast wealth; we're talking about sand and death."
  • The stock market: Trump dismissed the stock market's terrible December, blaming the historic monthly drop on a "little glitch." The president also predicted that stocks will head higher once the US negotiates updates to a variety of trade deals.
  • The departure of former Secretary of Defense James Mattis:
    • Trump criticized Mattis, the recently departed secretary of defense, complaining about the former Marine Corps general's handling of Afghanistan. "What's he done for me? How had he done in Afghanistan? Not too good," Trump said.
    • The president also claimed he "essentially" fired Mattis, contradicting White House assertions that the defense secretary stepped down. Mattis disagreed with Trump's decision to withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan.
  • The need to release reports on the status of the Afghanistan mission to the public: Trump criticized the public release of Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reports, which provide oversight of efforts to rebuild the country. "We're fighting wars, and they're doing reports and releasing it to the public. Now, the public means the enemy," he said. "The enemy reads those reports. They study every line of it."
  • The ongoing dialogue with North Korea: Trump said the US has made a lot of progress in talks with North Korea's Kim Jung Un despite lingering questions about the country's commitment to denuclearization."We've established a very good relationship, we're given no credit for it," Trump said. "Frankly if this administration didn't take place, if another administration came in instead of this administration ... you'd be at war right now, you'd be having a nice, big, fat war in Asia."
  • Mitt Romney's op-ed: Trump hit back at incoming Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, who criticized the president in an op-ed for The Washington Post on Tuesday. "I don't know if he's going to become a team player. I hope he does. If he does, it will be better for him I think people are upset with what he did," Trump said. "He's not even in office yet; he's not gotten to office. He was very happy when I endorsed him. So you know, I don't know what changed."
  • The similarities US generals share with Tom Cruise: While addressing the topic of Iran's influence in the Middle East, Trump favorably compared US military leaders to the movie star Tom Cruise. "When I became president, I had a meeting at the Pentagon with lots of generals," Trump said. "They were like from a movie, better-looking than Tom Cruise — and stronger."

SEE ALSO: Trump says the market's recent sell-off was just a 'little glitch' after stocks post the worst December since the Great Depression

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NOW WATCH: MSNBC host Chris Hayes thinks President Trump's stance on China is 'not at all crazy'

The next wave of global terrorists is just as menacing as ISIS but isn't from the Middle East

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Members of 5th Special Forces Group (A) conducting 50. Cal Weapons training during counter ISIS operations at Al Tanf Garrison in southern Syria.

  • For decades, US officials have focused on attacks launched by Middle Easteners. Today, however, the real threat comes from former Soviet states and Russia. 
  • In recent years Middle Eastern jihadis have been too preoccupied with local conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen to head elsewhere.
  • At the same time, the wars in the Middle East have transformed militants from Russian-speaking areas, who previously focused on fighting repressive governments at home, into global terrorists.
  • By 2017, at least 8,500 fighters from former Soviet republics had flocked to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State, and battle-tested jihadis from the post-Soviet world can travel far more easily than Arabs who hold Iraqi, Syrian, or Yemeni passports.
  • As the locus of terrorism changes, the US and its allies will have to update their strategies for fighting it, and it will involve political challenges, since they'll have to find a way to cooperate with Russia and its neighbors.

The way Westerners think about Islamist terrorism has grown dangerously outdated.

For decades, officials have focused on attacks launched by Middle Easterners. Today, however, the real threat increasingly comes from further east.

In the former Soviet states and beyond, militants who once harbored mostly local grievances are turning their attention to the West. They will be the menace to watch in 2019.

The threat posed by Middle Eastern terrorists has been shrinking for some time. Even during the war against the Islamic State, Russian speakers from former Soviet countries were already committing many of the major attacks in the West.

Those included relatively simple lone-wolf events, such as the 2017 truck strikes on pedestrians in New York and Stockholm—both conducted by Uzbeks—but also more complicated operations, such as the 2016 suicide bombing of Istanbul’s airport—which was allegedly organized by a Russian national—and the 2017 attack on a nightclub in the same city, led by an Uzbek.

There are several reasons for the relative increase in anti-Western terrorism coming out of the post-Soviet world.

For starters, in recent years Middle Eastern jihadis have been too preoccupied with local conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen to head elsewhere. The pull of the Islamic State, meanwhile, has faded after its almost total defeat in Iraq and Syria.

New York terror attack

At the same time, the wars in the Middle East have transformed militants from Russian-speaking areas, who previously focused on fighting repressive governments at home, into global terrorists.

By 2017, at least 8,500 fighters from former Soviet republics had flocked to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State. That experience gave many of these jihadis their first taste battling U.S. and NATO troops, and it left them looking for vengeance, convinced that future operations should be aimed at the West.

Ahmed Chataev, for example, who allegedly organized the attack on Istanbul’s airport, apparently first cooked up plans to strike Western targets while fighting in Iraq and Syria. A phone conversation leaked last year between Chataev and another Russian-speaking terrorist, Islam Atabiev, revealed that the two were planning to collect intelligence on several U.S. consulates and restaurants popular with Americans in Turkey and Georgia.

turkey istanbul airport attack

The same dynamic has played out further east, where battle-tested jihadis from the post-Soviet world can travel far more easily than Arabs who hold Iraqi, Syrian, or Yemeni passports.

As the persecution of Muslims in Asia grows, so do opportunities for grievances to turn international. When I was in Bangladesh in July 2018, I came across at least two separate groups from the Caucasus providing religious aid in Muslim Rohingya refugee camps.

A leader of a Russian-speaking group affiliated with militants in Syria said he had likewise planned to send some of his people to Bangladesh.

Such contact could boost the capabilities of local jihadis already conducting anti-Western operations in the area, including those who in 2016 stormed a bakery in Dhaka that was popular with expats. And it may win more Rohingya over to the idea that they’re involved in a global struggle for Islam, not just a local fight for their own survival.

FILE PHOTO: Rohingya refugees line up for daily essentials distribution at Balukhali camp, near Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu

In the coming years, the terrorist threat from Russia and beyond will only increase.

With the fall of the Islamic State, Russian-speaking terrorists were mostly able to flee Iraq and Syria with more ease than Middle Eastern foreign fighters and are now back in hiding in the former Soviet sphere or in Europe. Having escaped the reach of the U.S. military, they may find it easier to bring their plots to fruition. Local sympathies will help.

Government neglect and outright repression have made religious Muslims in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan attractive targets for radicals looking for new recruits. Several popular sheikhs from the Middle East, including the Saudi cleric Abdulaziz al-Tarefe, now have significant Russian- and Arabic-language followings on social media.

As the locus of terrorism changes, the United States and its allies will have to update their strategies for fighting it.

donald trump

Over the last two decades, Washington built up a huge bureaucracy around Middle Eastern terrorism. Untold millions of dollars were poured into finding and training Arabic-speaking researchers and analysts.

According to data from a critical language scholarship program run by the U.S. government, out of 550 university students who will be admitted in 2019, 105 will be studying Arabic and only 60 Russian.

And according to professors with whom I’ve spoken—from top policy schools such as the Harvard Kennedy School, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service—the overwhelming majority of college students who plan to work in counterterrorism still minor in Middle Eastern studies or Arabic.

There’s also a dearth of experts who’ve specialized in Central Asia and can teach a new generation of analysts.

Reorienting the West’s focus will also involve political challenges, since the United States will have to find a way to cooperate with Russia and its neighbors.

Over the last several years, for example, U.S. companies have gotten good at deleting jihadi propaganda from U.S.-based social media platforms, but the same propaganda is still widely available on Russian-language apps such as VK and OK, which are popular across post-Soviet states.

Putin throwing major shade

Telegram, which was founded by a Russian national, has likewise become a major communications tool for terrorists of all backgrounds, and cell phones captured from the Islamic State revealed that they were operating on Ukrainian SIM cards.

Monitoring these systems and others will require deep cooperation and intelligence sharing with Russia. But such cooperation does not seem likely in the immediate future. There may simply be too much animosity between Washington and Moscow to allow for effective collaboration.

There’s also the problem of the quality of intelligence. Many of those who end up on domestic terrorist watchlists and even Interpol lists throughout the region are actually members of the domestic opposition.

Meanwhile, lots of known terrorists are never singled out: Russia is well-known for providing passports to radicals from the Caucasus on the grounds that letting would-be jihadis leave the country is easier than dealing with them at home.

Intelligence from the region has become so politicized—and is used so much more often to violate the human rights of religious citizens than to stop real terrorist attacks—that it is hard to know what the United States would do with it.

The West should have recognized this shift long ago.

It didn’t, but that doesn’t mean that it should sit on its hands now.

The United States and its allies need to recognize that future attacks are more likely to come from the East than the Middle East and that there is no other option than to cooperate with Russia and its neighbors to stop them.

If the United States fails to do so, it could soon see the effects in either a surge of attacks on the United States or the rise of a new post-Soviet-dominated terrorist group in one of the world’s many war zones.

Vera Mironova is a visiting scholar in the Harvard University economics department.

SEE ALSO: 10 global conflicts and tensions to watch in 2019

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Trump claimed ISIS was defeated just as the US military was ramping up its strikes on ISIS militants in Syria

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  • The president claimed on Dec. 19 that ISIS has been defeated as a justification to pull-out of Syria.
  • The latest military airstrike data appears to contradict Trump's claims, which he later walked back, that ISIS is defeated.
  • Between Dec. 16 and Dec. 29, the US military and its coalition partners conducted 469 strikes on ISIS targets, according to an Operation Inherent Resolve press release.
  • Those strikes appear to be part of an uptick in strikes on extremists in Iraq and Syria.

As the president declared victory over the Islamic State last month, the US military and its coalition partners dropped hundreds of bombs on ISIS militants.

In justifying the rapid withdrawal of US troops from Syria, President Donald Trump tweeted a video message on Dec. 19, declaring, "We have won against ISIS. 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."

Between Dec. 16 and Dec. 29, coalition forces conducted 469 strikes in Syria, engaging more than six hundred ISIS fighters and destroying and damaging dozens of facilities and fighting positions, Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve revealed Friday.

These strikes appear to be part of a larger uptick in strikes on ISIS in Syria that began last summer, as the number of bombs dropped on ISIS in Iraq and Syria rose from 241 in July to 876 in October, the US Air Forces Central Command Combined Air Operations Center introduced in its latest report.

Amid criticism from lawmakers and foreign policy experts from both sides of the aisle, Trump walked back his declaration of victory one day later, arguing that other countries should take up the fight against ISIS.

"Do we want to be there forever?" the president tweeted."Time for others to finally fight."

In a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, Trump said proudly, "We're hitting the hell out of them, the ISIS people ... we’re down to final blows."

ISIS is believed to still have tens of thousands of fighters in Iraq and Syria, although these numbers are difficult to confirm. The administration has argued that the campaign against ISIS will continue, just without US troops in Syria. Confusion abounds about the scale and types of missions the US will continue against ISIS. 

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who initially called plans for a withdrawal an "Obama-like mistake," has since suggested that Trump understands that there is more to do before the US packs up and heads out. "He promised to destroy ISIS," the South Carolina lawmaker said Sunday, "He's going to keep that promise. We're not there yet, but as I said today, we're inside the 10-yard line and the president understands the need to finish the job."

Some experts see the imminent US withdrawal as a strategic victory for US adversaries like Iran, Syria's Assad regime and Russia.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, refusing to give a timetable for withdrawal, said Wednesday that "our troops are coming out," but he insisted that the campaign to defeat ISIS would continue.

"The President also made very clear that we needed to continue the counter-ISIS campaign, and we needed to continue to ensure that we did the things to create stability throughout the Middle East. The counter-Iran campaign continues. We’ll do all of those things. We’ll continue to achieve those outcomes. We will simply do it at a time when the American forces have departed Syria," the secretary explained.

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Another top Pentagon official just resigned

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  • Department of Defense chief of staff Rear Adm. Kevin Sweeney resigned on Saturday, following other high-profile Pentagon departures.
  • Sweeney said a statement that he "decided the time is right to return to the private sector."
  • Defense Secretary Jim Mattis also stepped down last month, after President Donald Trump announced he would withdraw US troops from Syria.

Another top Pentagon official announced Saturday he would step down from his role, following the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis last month and President Donald Trump's controversial decision to withdraw US troops from Syria.

Rear Adm. Kevin Sweeney, who has served as chief of staff to the Secretary of Defense since January 2017, said he would leave the department and move to the private sector.

"After two years in the Pentagon, I've decided the time is right to return to the private sector," Sweeney said in a statement. "It has been an honor to serve again alongside the men and women of the Department of Defense."

Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White also resigned earlier this week.

Read more: Trump says 'the generals' asked for more time in Syria, but he said 'Nope' because 'We've knocked them silly'

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis speaks during the 2018 POW/MIA National Recognition Day Ceremony at the Pentagon in Washington, Friday, Sept. 21, 2018.

Mattis stepped down last month after Trump decided to withdraw troops from Syria, writing in a searing resignation letter that Trump should find a replacement whose "views are better aligned with yours" on issues like respecting allies and recognizing enemies.

Another prominent resignation following Trump's Syria decision was that of Brett McGurk, the top US official leading the 79-nation fight against ISIS. McGurk told his colleagues he could not in good conscience carry out Trump's orders to withdraw 2,000 troops.

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Trump's plan to get out of Syria is collapsing already

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  • President Donald Trump said on December 19 that the terrorist group ISIS was defeated in Syria and that US troops would therefore leave.
  • The situation is much more complicated.
  • The US wants Turkey to hold the line and take on the remnants of ISIS, which is not totally defeated.
  • It also wants assurances that Turkey will not attack Kurdish militants, which Turkey considers terrorists, in Syria.
  • Trump's national security adviser, John Bolton, went to Turkey this week to secure these assurances.
  • But Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday refused to agree to Bolton's conditions and said Bolton "made a serious mistake."
  • It is not clear how Trump will be able to deliver on his promise if the US and Turkey cannot agree.

President Donald Trump's controversial plan to pull US troops out of Syria is starting to fall apart already, because Turkey — which the US wants to step up when it leaves — won't agree to the White House's terms.

The cracks in the plan became evident on Tuesday when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan publicly rebuked Trump's national security adviser, John Bolton, who is visiting the country to insist that Turkey fulfills the criteria for a US withdrawal.

Bolton told reporters on Sunday that he would seek Turkey's assurance that it will not attack Kurdish militants in northern Syria after the US is gone.

kurdish ypg flag

US forces in Syria are fighting alongside the People's Protection Units, or YPG, a Kurdish militia in Syria.

Turkey considers YPG forces to be terrorists because of their connection to the Kurdistan Workers' Party, a group in Turkey that Ankara considers a terrorist organization.

The US believes that its withdrawal from Syria could leave YPG fighters vulnerable to Turkish attacks.

Bolton said on Sunday, according to the BBC: "We don't think the Turks ought to undertake military action that is not fully coordinated with and agreed to by the United States."

He said the conditions were "at a minimum so they don't endanger our troops, but also so that they meet the president's requirement that the Syrian opposition forces that have fought with us are not endangered."

US Marines Syria Operation Inherent Resolve

Erdogan on Tuesday refused to give such assurance and slammed Bolton's thinking as "a serious mistake."

He told his AK Party at the Turkish Parliament in Ankara, according to Reuters, that "if they are terrorists, we will do what is necessary, no matter where they come from."

"Bolton has made a serious mistake, and whoever thinks like this has also made a mistake," Erdogan added. "It is not possible for us to make compromises on this point."

According to Ragip Soylu, the Turkey correspondent at the Qatari-funded news organization Middle East Eye, Erdogan added that "saying that Turkey targets Syrian Kurds, which is a lie itself, is the lowest, most dishonorable, ugliest, most banal slander ever."

Read more:Trump says 'the generals' asked for more time in Syria, but he said 'Nope' because 'We've knocked them silly'

donald trump

Erdogan's remarks appear to have opened up a new rift between the US and Turkey.

Bolton, who is in the Middle East this week, will leave Turkey on Tuesday without meeting Erdogan at all, The Associated Press reported.

His Turkish counterpart, Ibrahim Kalin, abruptly canceled a scheduled joint press conference after their meeting, Agence France-Presse reported.

On December 19, Trump announced his decision to pull all 2,000 troops out of Syria, claiming that it was because "we have defeated ISIS in Syria"— contradicting analyses from the US-led coalition that the "mission in northeast Syria remains unchanged."

The president appeared to walk back his claim the next day, saying in a tweet: "Does the USA want to be the Policeman of the Middle East, getting NOTHING but spending precious lives and trillions of dollars protecting others who, in almost all cases, do not appreciate what we are doing? ... Time for others to finally fight."

The decision to withdraw from Syria has been controversial; James Mattis, the former US defense secretary, and Brett McGurk, the top US official leading the 79-nation fight against ISIS, both resigned over it.

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NOW WATCH: Here’s what it was like to live in a city controlled by ISIS

The problem with America's Syria policy isn't Trump. It's Syria.

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  • Trump's call to pull out of Syria and then wavering on his decision is not unique — Obama occassionally sounded and acted just as confused about Syria. 
  • This is because, for Washington, the Syrian civil war is a no-win situation.
  • Backing the rebels means potentially supporting radicals who could harbor terrorists. Supporting the force capable of defeating the rebels means backing Assad.

President Donald Trump’s apparent confusion about what he wants the United States to do in Syriaone week he’s pulling out and the next he’s notis hardly unique.

During his entire second term, President Barack Obama occasionally sounded and acted almost as confused about Syria as his successor has.

There’s a reason why two such disparate presidents have suffered this common dilemma: For Washington, the Syrian civil war is a no-win situation.

If you want to back the rebels, you end up supporting radical Islamists who could exploit yet another dysfunctional Arab state and harbor anti-American terrorists. If you seek to support the only force capable of defeating the rebels, you end up backing a war criminal and Iran’s close friend, President Bashar al-Assad.

On the whole, U.S. policy through both Obama and Trump has become one of tolerating Assad over the alternative while not saying so and looking the other way.

donald trump

Certainly one could argue the United States should be supplying more humanitarian aid, but there is not much else Washington can do. If the Russians and Iranians have no compunctions about propping Assad up, then they’re essentially doing America’s dirty workkilling radical Islamists (along with many thousands of innocents, tragically)and at little cost to the United States, except in terms of its image as a global benefactor. 

This is America’s unspoken (and largely bipartisan) Syria policy. It’s the best that Washington can muster, many analysts say, and in the coldest of national interest calculations it hasn’t produced the worst of outcomes.

For the last several years, various U.S. enemies have been knocking each other off in great numbers there: Sunni jihadis in Syria, joined by Iraqi Sunni insurgents across the border, on the one hand, and Iran-backed Hezbollah Shiites, as well as the Assad government, on the other.

A Syrian army soldier gestures as he holds a Syrian flag in Quneitra, Syria July 27, 2018.

The presence or absence of some 2,000 U.S. troops—who mainly supply military support to the Kurds in the country’s east—will do little to change any of this.

Beyond that, there is little in Syria for U.S. interests but “sand and death,” as Trump put it bluntly last week. It has no real strategic value.

True, Syria is a horrific humanitarian disaster, but Washington really isn’t in the business of intervening in those anymore, not since the catastrophe of Iraq and the blowback from Libya.

Indeed, by fudging and hedging for years over what to doand giving limited support to rebelsWashington has probably only prolonged the war and made the humanitarian crisis worse for Syria and for Europe, which has suffered from the huge refugee outflow.

syrian refugee

Trump appeared to say as much in his impromptu remarks at a White House cabinet meeting last week, when he reluctantly backtracked on a quick withdrawal by saying the U.S. presence was mainly about keeping faith with the Kurds. “We want to protect the Kurds,” he said. “But I don’t want to be in Syria forever.” Trump said again: “It’s sand. And it’s death.”

“That’s totally the truth,” said Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma who was one of the few to accurately predict Assad’s long-term survival in power. “It’s just not an important country for the United States.”

Not everyone agrees with this point of view, of coursewhich is one reason Trump is now backtracking.

Hawks such as National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo want a strong U.S. presence against Iran, which until Vladimir Putin stepped in was Assad’s No. 1 ally.

Syrian war conflict Russia Putin Bashar al-Assad US

“Trump is all messed up. His position in Syria is in severe tension with his stated Iran policy,” said Reuel Marc Gerecht of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “And he is set to repeat Obama’s mistake [withdrawing from] Iraq in 2011, unless Iran and Russia are willing to up their lethal commitments in Syria: There are just too many Sunnis and too few Alawites. Iran effectively now controls Syrian ground forces.”

In other words, Iranian support is critical if Assad is to remain in power because the Syrian leader hails from the minority Alawites, a Shiite sect. Assad therefore needs Tehran’s military help in holding off the mostly Sunni rebels.

But Iran has long been the Assad family’s strategic partner for that very reason, and this is unlikely to change (and neither has it prevented U.S.-Syrian cooperation in the past, for example between Assad’s intelligence service and the CIA in pursuit of al Qaeda in the pre-civil war era).

During his tenure, Obama never contradicted himself on Syria quite as plainly as Trump, who on Dec. 19 of last year announced that U.S. troops would leave in 30 days and that the Islamic State was defeated. That caused a brouhaha and prompted Defense Secretary James Mattis to resignbefore Trump took it all back a week later.

Barack Obama syria sweden

Obama’s most hesitant missteps were almost as embarrassing, however: At one point, he declared a “red line” over the use of chemical weapons, then said he would retaliate because Assad had used them, and then decided to kick the matter over to Congress.

The United States has basically had a hands-off policy toward Syria since at least 1947, when then-Secretary of State George C. Marshall declined to send a mission to Damascus as the Arab states geared up to attack the newborn Israel.

After the Syrian civil war broke out nearly eight years ago as part of the Arab spring, the Obama administration temporized over what to do. At first it seemed as if Assad would falland Washington called for him to step aside.

Liberal interventionists urged U.S. intervention for humanitarian reasons, but Obama didn’t want to replay the horrors of Iraq, and he strongly suspected that the so-called secular Syrian rebels were little more than rewrites of the Iraqi con man Ahmed Chalabi—big talkers in Washington with no real backing at home.

syria

Then, after Libya largely fell into Islamist hands after Muammar al-Qaddafi’s U.S.-aided downfallwhich Obama later called the biggest regret of his presidencyand it turned out that Assad would survive and was the only thing standing in the way of an Islamist takeover in Syria, Obama had a realist reckoning: The Arab world still needed its strongmen.

The problem Trump has now is that with his administration’s ditheringBolton said U.S. troops will remain as long as the Islamic State and the Iranian threat dohe’s in danger of adopting a similar policy of pretense as Obama once did.

Iranian influence in Syria isn’t going away, and it’s hard to imagine the Islamist threat being entirely wiped out. That’s a prescription for an indefinite stayand continuing to support some rebels. But that’s almost certainly a no-win scenario too.

“The only viable counterterrorism policy in the region is to have a strong state with strong policemen,” Landis said. “You’ve got to deal with Assad. The Russians are doing that. The Gulf Arab states are beginning to do that too. But that’s anathema for Bolton and Pompeo. It means accepting Iran as the dominant power.”

And Washington, in the end, will have little choice but to go along.

Michael Hirsh is a senior correspondent at Foreign Policy. @michaelphirsh

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I've studied the Middle East for 30 years, and it's not possible to compare Trump and Obama's Middle East policies because Trump doesn't have one

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Barack Obama Afghanistan.

  • Pundits and politicians are having a field day comparing Trump's Middle East policy to that of Barack Obama.
  • While both presidents have advocated decreasing America's footprint in the region, their policies are comparable only on the most superficial level.
  • While both presidents favored troop withdrawal, they did so but with different intentions.
  • Unlike Obama, Trump does not have a Middle East strategy, grand or otherwise. He has impulses.
The Conversation

On Jan. 6, National Security Advisor John Bolton walked back President Donald Trump's announcement that the US would quickly withdraw US troops from Syria, saying that such a withdrawal might actually take months or years.

Trump's announcement came more than two weeks earlier. Soon after, Trump also directed the Pentagon to halve the number of US troops in Afghanistan.

Whatever the fate of either order, pundits and politicians are having a field day comparing Trump's Middle East policy to that of Barack Obama.

"On this issue… there is more continuity between Trump and Obama than would make either administration comfortable," Richard N. Haas, president of The Council on Foreign Relations, told The New York Times in an article headlined "A Strategy of Retreat in Syria, with Echoes of Obama."

Donald Trump IraqThe next day, The Hill repeated the sentiment in an article whose headline holds nothing back: "Trump's Middle East Policy Looks a lot Like Obama's — That's not a Good Thing."

Even Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), whose support for Trump is matched only by his disdain for Obama's Middle East policy, called Trump's plan "an Obama-like mistake."

As someone who has studied and written about the Middle East for more than 30 years, this comparison immediately struck me as wrong.

Read more: Trump's plan to get out of Syria is collapsing already

While both presidents have advocated decreasing America's footprint in the region, I believe their policies are comparable only on the most superficial level. Understanding why enables us to see the fundamental flaw underlying the current policy.

Trump vs. Obama: Afghanistan

Obama and Trump have taken contrasting approaches to the Afghanistan war, America's longest. Both favored troop withdrawal — but with different intentions.

In June 2011, Obama announced a multi-year timetable for a withdrawal, after an initial surge. His goal was to let the Afghan government know that the US commitment to Afghanistan was not open-ended. The Afghans had to get their house in order, then take over the fight before the US left for good.

Read more: The problem with America's Syria policy isn't Trump. It's Syria.

It was, in effect, an announcement of the "Afghanistanization" of the war, similar in intent to Richard Nixon's policy of "Vietnamization."

In 1969, Nixon proposed replacing US combat troops with South Vietnamese troops in order to extricate the United States from a seemingly endless war. This was Obama's goal in Afghanistan as well. By the end of his second term, however, circumstances there persuaded him to slow the withdrawal.

AfghanistanWhen Trump announced his policy toward Afghanistan during the first year of his presidency, he mocked Obama's plan. According to Trump, "Conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables, will guide our strategy from now on."

And instead of "Afghanistanization," Trump originally supported increasing the use of force to compel the Taliban, whom the US and its allies are fighting in Afghanistan, to come to the bargaining table.

The Taliban had other ideas.

Rather than being backed into a corner, the Taliban recently made battlefield gains and is defying US efforts to negotiate a settlement. It was in this context that Trump decided that "conditions on the ground" were ripe for a partial US withdrawal.

Trump vs. Obama: The greater Middle East

Obama's Afghanistan policy was part of a broader approach his administration took toward the Middle East.

As I have argued elsewhere, Obama believed that the United States had expended far too much blood and treasure in the Middle East under his predecessor, George W. Bush. For Obama, the region's deep-seated problems made it more trouble than it was worth.

Obama believed that an economically ascendant Asia, not the Middle East, will be the epicenter of global competition in the 21st century. His goal, then, was to get the United States out of the Middle East and "pivot to Asia."

Obama wanted to calm the waters in the Middle East, then shift the burden of policing it to America's partners there, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, as the United States had done during the Cold War.

Read more: Both Trump and Obama published reports on fuel standards, and both were flawed. But Trump's is worse.

Hence, his policies were aimed at the withdrawal of US forces from the region, forging an Iran nuclear deal, and restarting negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. This strategy could have enabled the United States to focus its attention on Asia.

Unfortunately for Obama, the chaos created by the Arab uprisings of 2010-11, the resistance of US partners in the region to what they believed was American disengagement, and poor execution stymied his grand strategy.

Unlike Obama, Trump does not have a Middle East strategy, grand or otherwise. He has impulses.

Trump's move to withdraw troops from Syria came as a spur-of-the-moment decision during a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. After Erdoğan asked Trump why the United States still had troops there, Trump reportedly replied, "You know what? It's yours. I'm leaving."

This surprised his national security team, which assumed that the United States was still committed to fighting Islamic State militants in Syria alongside the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces, which the United States will now abandon.

Does this mean that Trump is prepared to jettison the global war on terror, not to mention the Saudi-led coalition to stop the spread of Iranian influence in the region? At one time, both seemed bedrock policies of the Trump administration. Now, not so much.

American troops in SyriaWith US forces gone from Syria, so is a check on Iranian ambitions to expand its military presence and political influence there — much to the horror of officials not only in the United States, but in Saudi Arabia and Israel as well.

Adding insult to injury, Trump followed his "I'm leaving" statement with another that was just as impulsive. In a conversation with reporters, he said: "Iran is pulling people out of Syria, but they can frankly do whatever they want there."

None of this is to say that America's open-ended commitments in Afghanistan and Syria and the global war on terror do not deserve rethinking.

I and numerous other observers have been calling for that for years.

But while we are doing that rethinking, it is important to remember an aphorism that is often repeated in military circles: "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." It is a useful guide to the difference between the Obama and Trump approaches to the Middle East.

James L. Gelvin is a professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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Pompeo offers blistering rebuke of Obama’s foreign policy in Cairo speech: 'The age of self-inflicted American shame is over'

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Mike Pompeo

  • Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday delivered a speech in Cairo, Egypt, in which he laid out the Trump administration's roadmap for the Middle East and ripped into former President Barack Obama. 
  • "The age of self-inflicted American shame is over," Pompeo declared to an audience at the American University in Cairo. 
  • Pompeo's speech was the antithesis of an address Obama gave in the Egyptian capital in 2009.
  • His speech came as the Trump administration faces broad criticism over its foreign policy, particularly in relation to the Middle East.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday delivered a speech in Cairo, Egypt, in which he laid out the Trump administration's roadmap for the Middle East and ripped into former President Barack Obama's foreign policy. 

"The age of self-inflicted American shame is over, and so are the policies that produced so much needless suffering," Pompeo said to an audience at American University in Cairo. "The United States under President Trump has reasserted its traditional role as a force for good in this region, because we’ve learned from our mistakes."

Pompeo's speech was the antithesis of an address Obama gave in the Egyptian capital in 2009, in which the former president pledged to work toward healing the wounds he said were created by the Bush administration's approach to counterterrorism. At the time, Obama called for "a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world."

Read more: America's 'war on terror' has cost the US nearly $6 trillion and killed roughly half a million people, and there's no end in sight

In what was an obvious retort to Obama's Cairo address, Pompeo on Thursday declared that "now comes the real new beginning."

Barack Obama

'When America retreats, chaos often follows'

Over the course of his speech, Pompeo accused Obama of breeding chaos in the Middle East by being too soft on extremism. Employing a tactic upon which Obama has often relied when rebuking President Donald Trump, the secretary of state did not mention Obama's name once.

"It was here, here in this city, another American stood before you,” said Pompeo. "He told you that radical Islamist terrorism does not stem from an ideology. He told you 9/11 led my country to abandon its ideals, particularly in the Middle East. He told you that the United States and the Muslim world needed 'a new beginning.'"

Obama refuses to use the phrase "radical Islamic terrorism," for which Trump and other Republicans have criticized him.

Read more: Trump inherited Obama's drone war and he's significantly expanded it in countries where the US is not technically at war

"The results of these misjudgments were dire," Pompeo said. "In falsely seeing ourselves as a force for what ails the Middle East, we were timid in asserting ourselves when the times – and our partners – demanded it."

The secretary of state also outlined various ways in which he felt Trump's predecessor fell short as commander-in-chief: failing to confront Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, softening the US government's stance toward Iran, and allowing for the rise of the Islamic State group, or ISIS.

"We learned that when America retreats, chaos often follows," Pompeo said. "When we neglect our friends, resentment builds. And when we partner with our enemies, they advance."

Pompeo warned of the consequences of American retreat, even as Trump seeks to withdraw the US from Syria and Afghanistan

His speech came as the Trump administration faces broad criticism over its foreign policy, particularly in relation to the Middle East. 

Trump in late December announced a plan to withdraw US troops from Syria, inaccurately claiming ISIS had been defeated in the process. Shortly thereafter, James Mattis resigned as secretary of defense. Mattis had disagreed with Trump on an array of issues, especially the president's treatment of US allies, and the Syria announcement seemed to be the last straw. 

Read more: Mattis' resignation letter is a sharp rebuke of Trump's 'America First' philosophy

Trump has also pushed for the US to withdraw from Afghanistan in addition to Syria, but has flip-flopped on the process surrounding these proposed withdrawals. His administration has failed to offer a timeline or much in the way of specifics.

U.S. Marines with 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, attached to Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force, Crisis Response-Central Command, prepare to board an MV-22 Osprey on their way to a site near At-Tanf Garrison, Syria, Sept. 7, 2018.

The Syria withdrawal announcement has prompted concerns Trump is essentially gifting the territory to Iran and Russia, and opening the door for Turkey to go after a the Kurds — fierce fighters who've played a vital role in combatting ISIS. Many are also concerned a US withdrawal would create a path for ISIS to make a comeback

Pompeo commented, however, on the detrimental consequences of America retreating and the danger of "neglecting" friends. 

The secretary of state's address also came exactly 100 days after the brutal killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was a columnist for The Washington Post. The Trump administration has faced significant backlash over its response to the killing, and has been accused of aiding the Saudis in a cover-up.

'Pompeo's speech showcases this administration’s twin obsessions: President Obama and Iran'

Ned Price, a former CIA analyst who also served on the National Security Council under Obama, was unimpressed by Pompeo's speech. 

"Pompeo's speech showcases this administration’s twin obsessions: President Obama and Iran," Price told INSIDER. "Nothing could be more on-brand for Pompeo and this administration than taking on a nearly decade-old speech, while completely missing its key lessons, all of which have stood the test of time despite the region’s intervening turmoil."

Read more: Trump just radically upended US Syria policy despite repeated warnings that doing so could be disastrous

"What Pompeo also failed to recognize is that Obama's speech was aimed at the region’s people; his own speech today was directed at its autocrats," Price added. "That's not to say that America shouldn't address the world's leaders. But Pompeo seems to have intentionally distorted the intent and audience of President Obama's Cairo address and ignored the strategically important initiatives it spawned." 

Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif also promptly reacted to Pompeo's speech, repudiating the secretary of state for his verbal attacks against Tehran. 

Read more: Trump's plan to get out of Syria is collapsing already

"Whenever/wherever US interferes, chaos, repression & resentment follow,"Zarif tweeted. "The day Iran mimics US clients & @SecPompeo's 'human rights models'–be it the Shah or current butchers–to become a 'normal' country is the day hell freezes over. Best for the US to just get over loss of Iran."

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The US has officially started withdrawing troops from war-torn Syria

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U.S. Marines with 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, attached to Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force, Crisis Response-Central Command, prepare to board an MV-22 Osprey on their way to a site near At-Tanf Garrison, Syria, Sept. 7, 2018.

  • The US has started the process of "our deliberate withdrawal from Syria," a Operation Inherent Resolve spokesman revealed Friday.
  • The withdrawal began Thursday night, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human RIghts.
  • The US has roughly 2,000 troops in Syria.

BAGHDAD (AP) — An American military official says the U.S.-led military coalition has begun the process of withdrawing troops from Syria.

Col. Sean Ryan, spokesman for the U.S.-coalition fighting the Islamic State group, says the U.S. started "the process of our deliberate withdrawal from Syria."

In a statement emailed to The Associated Press on Friday, he declined to discuss specific timelines or locations or troops movements out of concern for operational security.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict in Syria through a network of activists on the ground, said the withdrawal began Thursday night. It said a convoy of about 10 armored vehicles, in addition to some trucks, pulled out from Syria's northeastern town of Rmeilan into Iraq.

The U.S. has around 2,000 troops in Syria.

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The US has started pulling out of Syria after a week of chaotic, confusing messages

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U.S. personnel provide security during an independent patrol outside Manbij, Syria, Aug. 11, 2018. These independent, coordinated patrols are conducted with Turkish military forces who stay on the opposite side of the demarcation line.

  • The US has started withdrawing troops from Syria, the Department of Defense said Friday.
  • The US-led coalition against the Islamic State has "begun the process of our deliberate withdrawal from Syria," a spokesman said.
  • President Donald Trump first said on December 19 that he wanted to quickly pull troops out of Syria.
  • His abrupt announcement preceded a flurry of mixed messages over the extent of a US withdrawal, which troops would leave, and when.

The US on Friday said it had started withdrawing troops from Syria, despite the Trump administration saying as recently as this week that it planned to handle the withdrawal much differently.

The US-led, 79-nation coalition against the Islamic State terrorist group has begun its "deliberate withdrawal from Syria," Col. Sean Ryan, the spokesman for the alliance, said in a statement cited by Reuters and The New York Times.

"Out of concern for operational security, we will not discuss specific timelines, locations, or troop movements," he added, according to Reuters. INSIDER has contacted the Department of Defense for comment.

The news comes after weeks of chaotic mixed messages, which began with President Donald Trump's December 19 announcement that the US would move quickly to pull its 2,000 troops in Syria out of the country.

In making the announcement, Trump claimed victory against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, which holds only a fraction of the territory it once did but has not been eliminated.

Read more:Trump just radically upended US Syria policy despite repeated warnings that doing so could be disastrous

Donald Trump Iraq

The president originally said he wanted the troops out in 30 days but later rowed back his comments. His administration later lengthened the timeline for withdrawal.

The US was hoping that Turkey would help fight the remnants of ISIS in Syria.

That plan hit a snag earlier this week when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan publicly insulted the US national security adviser, John Bolton, and said he would not play ball with the US's plan.

john bolton erdogan

Washington wanted assurances that Turkey would not attack Kurdish militants in Syria — whom the US had been fighting with but whom Turkey considers terrorists — after the US departure.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Thursday that the US would carry out with its withdrawal plans despite Erdogan and Bolton's disagreement, Reuters reported.

Unnamed defense officials also told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday: "Nothing has changed. We don't take orders from Bolton."

Trump's announcement of a hasty, apparently unconditional withdrawal from Syria was met with opposition even from high-level US officials.

Both Jim Mattis, the US defense secretary, and Brett McGurk, the top US official leading the coalition against ISIS, resigned over it.

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White House's shock request for strike options on Iran suggests an extremely dangerous possibility

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John Bolton Mitt Romney

  • President Donald Trump's National Security Advisor John Bolton reportedly asked for the Pentagon to provide military options for striking Iran.
  • The Pentagon regularly prepares all kinds of military options for all kinds of scenarios, many of which are not imminent at all, but this request reportedly rattled the war planners.
  • Experts say the response to Bolton's request suggests he had something extreme planned.
  • Bolton has long advocated war against Iran and even regime change, which likely would shock the Pentagon.

President Donald Trump's National Security Advisor John Bolton reportedly asked the Pentagon to provide military options for striking Iran, which experts say should have been standard procedure, but somehow managed to shock defense officials.

Bolton, who has long advocated for the US to bomb Iran and even institute regime change against its theocratic rulers, requested options to strike Iran after Tehran-linked militants mortared, unsuccessfully, a US embassy in Baghdad, the Wall Street Journal first reported Sunday.

"It definitely rattled people," an official told the Journal. "People were shocked. It was mind-boggling how cavalier they were about hitting Iran."

But according to Ned Price, former special assistant to President Obama on the National Security Council, Bolton's response to an attack on the US represents standard operating procedure.

Read more:The Trump administration has been itching for a fight with Iran, but Mattis held it back. Now he's gone.

"It should come as no surprise that our military planners have devised war plans for a range of scenarios across the globe. Anything less would be derelict on their part," Price told Business Insider.

"What makes this different, however, is that the White House — in the form of Bolton — ordered the Pentagon to present these plans in the heat of the moment following an attack on US facilities," Price continued. "That’s qualitatively different than the Pentagon undertaking contingency planning as a matter of course."

So what could Bolton have requested from the Pentagon that came as such a shock?

Airstrikes.

operation desert storm

According to Patrick Clawson, the director of research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Pentagon's shock likely came from an extreme request from Bolton: Airstrikes. 

Clawson said it was natural for the US to look to retaliate against Iran after militants under its command attacked US personnel, but that the US had plenty of options, even military options, short of alarming.

For example, the US could have ordered the navy to intercept Iranian boats at sea that they suspect of arming Houthi rebels in Yemen as a measured military response that likely wouldn't shock many in the Pentagon, said Clawson. 

Read more:Trump's national security adviser John Bolton has advocated bombing North Korea — and he may be sabotaging talks

But the rattled response by Pentagon officials indicates that Bolton likely saw the attack in Baghdad as the start of a wider campaign against US citizens in the Middle East, and that Bolton sought a heavy-handed response.

"Airstrikes are a stupid idea," said Clawson. If Bolton requested options for airstrikes from the Pentagon, "somebody should come back and say that's a really dumb idea," he continued. 

While the US has ample air power and could easily hit targets in Iran, Clawson said "the Iranians would be able to play that well with their domestic audiences and the international audiences, saying the Americans are warmongerers and erratic."

Furthermore, Iran has denied directing the strike in Baghdad, though the US reportedly assesses they did indeed order attacks on the US.

iraq shia militia

Iran therefore has "plausible deniability" in the attacks, whereas airstrikes with US military jets do not afford that same deniability to the US, and would mark a large escalation, said Clawson. 

Read more: Trump has his cake and eats it too with sanctions tanking Iran's economy and oil staying low

"It’s the job of the Pentagon to have off-the-shelf options ready, but it’s the role of those in charge of policy — including the national security advisor — to ensure we employ force prudently and only as a last resort," said Price. 

The Trump administration has actually enjoyed some success in punishing Iran for its regional behavior and rallying support from Europe, despite its controversial withdrawal from the Iran deal.

But a direct air strike on Iran in response to a failed mortar attack that injured no one could easily trigger an all-out war across the region, and easily send chills down spines among Pentagon warplanners. 

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