U.S. President Donald Trump will not change his mind on withdrawing American troops from Syria, his acting chief of staff said Sunday, VOA news reports.
“I think the president has told people from the very beginning that he doesn’t want us to stay in Syria forever,” Mick Mulvaney told ABC’s “This Week” Sunday morning.
“You’re seeing the end result now of two years of work.”
When questioned about resignations of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the special U.S. envoy to the global coalition fighting the Islamic State Brett McGurk, Mulvaney said that it is “not unusual” for cabinet members to resign “over these types of disagreements.”
McGurk’s and Mattis’ resignations came after Trump declared last week that Islamic State had been defeated and that the 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria would return home.
Speaking from Chad on Sunday, French President Emmanuel Macron said that he “deeply regrets” Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria.
“To be an ally is to fight shoulder to shoulder,” he said, “paying tribute” to outgoing Secretary Mattis, who he called a “reliable partner”.
Tennessee Senator Bob Corker, the chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, said Sunday that he was “devastated” by the decision, calling the United States “unreliable”.
Late Saturday, one of Trump’s many tweets on the issue stated that he was bringing home the troops “happy and healthy” after “decimating ISIS in Syria.”
If anybody but your favorite President, Donald J. Trump, announced that, after decimating ISIS in Syria, we were going to bring our troops back home (happy & healthy), that person would be the most popular hero in America. With me, hit hard instead by the Fake News Media. Crazy!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) 23 декабря 2018 г.