President Trump wanted the U.S to withdraw troops from Syria. We never did.
An outgoing U.S. diplomat admitted in a recent interview with Defense One to lying to President Donald Trump and other senior administration officials about the true number of U.S. troops deployed in Syria in an effort to dissuade the president from withdrawing U.S. forces from the region.
Retiring Ambassador Jim Jeffrey, the U.S. special envoy for Syria, said that for years his team outright misled the Trump administration about troop levels deployed in the region.
"We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there," Jeffrey told Defense One. He admitted that the actual number of U.S. military forces in northeast Syria is "a lot more than" the roughly 200 troops Trump agreed to station there in 2019.
In 2018, President Trump announced that the United States had defeated ISIS in Syria and subsequently declared that U.S. forces would be withdrawn from the region. At the time, more than 2,000 troops were stationed in the region. His declaration was met with opposition from several national security officials, the media, and even some Republican lawmakers, such as Sens. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and Marco Rubio (Fla.). Trump's decision prompted Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis to resign.
No comments:
Post a Comment