A senior Trump administration official said Wednesday that she was unable to provide a time frame for U.S. troops leaving Syria after President Trump’s pull-out decision appeared to catch administration officials and lawmakers off-guard.
“It’s not that I’m not telling you, it’s that I don’t know, quite frankly,” the official said during a White House conference call with reporters, referring timetable questions to the Pentagon, which also dodged requests for clarification Wednesday.
The White House conference call was held to clarify Trump’s policy on pulling out about 2,000 troops, after lawmakers expressed concern about the abrupt end of a non-clandestine U.S. military operation that began with 2014 airstrikes.
The U.S. troops had been working alongside the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces alliance in northeast Syria, assisting the alliance in combating the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS, and protecting the Kurds against troops allied with Syrian President Bashar Assad and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
[Related: Lindsey Graham calls Syria withdrawal an ‘Obama-like mistake’]
“What the president told us to do, which he directed his administration to do, was destroy the territory caliphate of ISIS, not to turn Syria into a utopian democracy,” the senior official said during the White House call.
Earlier in the day, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said in a brief statement that “[w]e have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign,” but the senior official could not clarify how many troops had already left Syria.
“Our understanding is that we will be doing this repositioning of troops and assets in an orderly fashion. The timeline is being designed, and I’m going to refer you to the Pentagon on the logistics and the process for that, because they are working it right now. It’s not information that I have,” she said.
The official said the decision, which had been previously reported, then abandoned over an alleged chemical weapon attack in April, should not be seen as a surprise.
“Leaving troops in perpetuity is simply not the president’s policy in the Middle East,” the official said. “He believes very sincerely and has for a number of years that we do not have a military role in ending the civil war in Syria, which apparently is the policy that was shared by the previous administration.”
In response to a reporter who asserted that approximately 1 percent of Syria remains held by ISIS, the official said: “In terms of the remaining 1 percent, we believe that remaining pocket can be eliminated both by our own guys, but then also by regional and partner forces that are local to it. You can use that as an excuse to remain in perpetuity and have all sorts of other reasons to be there creep in.”
The official did not address the fate of U.S. Kurdish allies, whose primary political organization is regarded as a terrorist group by Turkey’s government. Erdogan threatened last week to attack the U.S.-supported enclave in a “few days.”
