US to keep 400 troops in Syria for 'undetermined amount of time'

Sputnik
Tue, 26 Mar 2019 17:29 UTC

© CC0 / Staff Sgt. Jacob Connor / 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne)

The remaining 400 US troops will stay in Syria to carry out clearing operations for an unidentified period of time, Special Representative for Syria Engagement James Jeffrey said in a press briefing on Monday.

"Our forces will stay on in very limited numbers in northeast and At Tanf to continue our clearing operations and stability operations against ISIS[Daesh] for a period of time not to be determined at this point", Jeffrey told reporters.

Last week, US President Donald Trump confirmed that a total of 400 US troops will remain in Syria.

White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters on Friday that the territorial caliphate of the Daesh terror group has been completely eliminated in Syria.

On Tuesday, the US-backed Arab-Kurdish detachments of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said they had taken control of Baghuz, last Daesh stronghold in Syria.

Trump announced in December that he had decided to pull out troops from Syria promising to bring about 2,000 US servicemen back home. However, no exact deadline for the return of troops has been revealed by US officials yet.

United States and its allies have been conducting operations against the Islamic State in Syria and neighboring Iraq since 2014. The US-led coalition's actions in Syria have never been authorized by either Damascus or the UN Security Council.

Comment: Also from Sputnik:

Last week, US President Donald Trump said that the US would leave 400 troops in Syria with 200 of them deployed closer to Israel.

US Special Envoy for Syria James Jeffrey said Monday that the fight against Daesh in Syria wasn't over, adding that the US would leave a limited number of its troops there.

"This is not the end of the fight against ISIS. That will go on, but it will be a different kind of fight. ISIS has lost much of its capability to project terrorist power and to have a recruiting base in an area that it controls," Jeffrey told reporters during a press briefing.

Jeffrey neglected to mention to reporters that the efforts of Syria and Russia have decimated ISIS and forced the US to 'mostly' leave the country.