Remarks by President Trump in Press Briefing | September 18, 2020We’re out of Syria, other than we kept the oil. I kept the oil. And we have troops guarding the oil. Other than that, we’re out of Syria. We took them off the border between Syria and Turkey. We had a lot of troops on the border. Ultimately, we got it down to 50, and I thought they were in great danger when you have two armies sitting there looking to fight, and you have 50 people in the middle. I don’t care who you are, even if you’re the U.S. — those 50 people are in great danger. We took them out.
But we had a lot of troops on the border, and we took them out. I said, “Look, they’ve been fighting on their border for 200 years and a lot longer than that, under different names, and they can continue to do that.” That’s not for us; we’re guarding our own borders. We’re doing very well on our southern border, as an example.
So we’re out of Syria, except we kept the oil, and we’ll make a determination. We’ll probably be dealing with the Kurds and the oil and see what it all ends up. But we’ll be out.
(Reminder:
Donald Trump's "seize the oil" scheme is a war crime.)
Meanwhile, in reality,
U.S. Sending More Troops to Syria to Counter the Russians (September 18th, 2020)
The military said on Friday that it was sending Bradley fighting vehicles, advanced radar and more fighter jet patrols to northeast Syria, three weeks after a Russian armored vehicle rammed an American ground patrol and injured seven American soldiers.
The reinforcements, which add about 100 troops to the more than 500 U.S. forces already there, represent a show of force in response to the clash last month that caught American commanders off guard. They are also likely to escalate tensions between the two rival powers in the country’s hotly contested northeast.
“These actions are a clear demonstration of U.S. resolve to defend coalition forces,” Capt. Bill Urban, a spokesman for the military’s Central Command, said in an email, “and to ensure that they are able to continue their defeat-ISIS mission without interference.”
The new deployment came on the same day that President Trump declared that American troops “are out of Syria,” except to guard the region’s oil fields. “Other than that, we are out of Syria,” Mr. Trump said at White House news conference, making no mention of what the Pentagon says is the main mission there: to help its Syrian Kurdish allies fight remnants of the Islamic State.
(Mr. Trump, well known for his obsequiousness toward Russian strongman Vladimir Putin as well as his extensive business dealings with Russia, has yet to comment publicly on the incident that injured American soldiers.)
