The top U.S. commander for the Middle East region said he is saluting smartly and carrying out President Trump’s surprise order to withdraw all American ground troops from Syria, calling the pullout “deliberate and coordinated,” in testimony before the Senate Tuesday.
Gen. Joseph Votel, the outgoing head of U.S. Central Command, might just as well have added another adjective: “leisurely.”
After admitting he was neither advised nor consulted beforehand about Trump’s abrupt decision to pull the plug on the U.S. ground support for proxy forces battling ISIS, Votel said he’s determined to clear out the last 20 square miles of ISIS’ physical caliphate before beginning the exodus in earnest.
“I am not under pressure to be out by a specific date, and I have not had any specific conditions put upon me,” Votel said when asked if the withdrawal was based on an arbitrary calendar date or conditions on the ground.
“I don’t consider this to be either time-based or conditions-based. The fact is the president made a decision, and we are going to execute his orders here to withdraw all forces from Syria,” Votel said.
“We are going to consider things like protection of our partners, the Kurds. We are going to consider the concerns that Turkey has along their border, and we are going to consider how we keep pressure on ISIS,” he said. “I look at this as an additional task within the confines of the current campaign plan that we’re operating, and that’s how we are approaching it.”
ISIS once controlled a wide swath of Iraq and Syria totaling some 34,000 square miles but is now down to between 1,000 and 1,500 fighters squeezed into a dense urban area, in eastern Syria near the border with Iraq, roughly one-third the size of D.C.
Another 20,000 to 30,000 are believed to be geographically dispersed across Iraq and Syria and have for the most part gone to ground.
