President Trump acknowledged Saturday a small contingent of U.S. troops will remain in Syria despite announcing last year his controversial decision to withdraw all American forces from the country.
“We’ll leave a small group of guys and gals, but we want to bring our people back home. We want to bring our people back home. It’s time,” Trump said during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Md. “We were going to be in Syria for four months. We ended up five years just fighting. They just like to fight.”
In Syria, specifically, the president said that as early as today 100 percent of the Islamic State’s caliphate in Syria and Iraq will be defeated by the U.S.-led coalition.
Trump in December ordered the 2,000 American service members in Syria to return home, saying on Twitter the Islamic State there had been defeated. But the president’s move was widely criticized by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and led to the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who disagreed with the withdrawal of troops.
The White House has since backed away from its initial plan to remove all U.S. forces from Syria. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders announced last month a “small peacekeeping group of about 200 will remain in Syria for a period of time.”
Trump frequently promises to bring American troops home from foreign conflicts and has criticized President Barack Obama for “fighting in endless wars.”
