US will keep the peace in Syria
THE US will keep 200 troops in Syria after President Donald Trump’s pullout from the wartorn nation, the White House has announced.
“A small peacekeeping group of about 200 will remain in Syria for a period of time,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said yesterday.
The announcement comes amid fierce criticism of Mr Trump’s decision to withdraw America’s 2000 troops from Syria by April 30, with members of his own Republican Party blasting the move.
In December, Mr Trump declared victory over the Islamic State in Syria, even though thousands of jihadists remained.
Fighting continues around their final holdout in the nation’s north east, bringing US-backed forces closer to eliminating the last of the IS fighters.
A few hundred people – many of them women and terrified-looking children – have been evacuated from the group’s tiny tent camp on the banks of the Euphrates River, signalling an imminent end to the territorial rule of the militants’ self-declared “caliphate” that once stretched across a third of both Syria and Iraq.
Some 300 IS militants, along with hundreds of civilians believed to be mostly their families, have been under siege for more than a week in the tent camp in the village of Baghouz. Nearly 20,000 people left through a humanitarian corridor on foot from the IS holdout earlier this month but the militants have now closed the passage.
The presence of civilians and possibly senior members of the militant group in Baghouz have slowed the group’s defeat. Hundreds of women and children from Wednesday’s evacuation could be seen in the middle of the desert on the way out of Baghouz.