U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday defended his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from northern Syria even as criticism points to the United States having betrayed its Kurdish allies in the region.
In talking about the Kurds, who have helped the United States fight the Islamic State (ISIS) and other terror factions, the president said, “The Kurds are safer right now… they are not angels, they are not angels.” He added that they are not strong fighters without U.S. assistance.
Trump said that the United States isn’t “a policing agent. It is time for us to go home.”
It has also been reported that the president falsely stated that “the Kurds actually are pulling back substantially from Turkey, and Syria’s pulling in.”
Russia has started patrolling territory separating Turkish and Syrian forces in the northeast Syrian town of Manbij, where the flag of the Syrian regime was raised for the first time in years.
“So I view the situation on the Turkish border with Syria to be, for the United States, strategically brilliant,” said Trump. “Our soldiers are totally safe. They’ve got to work it out. Maybe they can do it without fighting. Syria’s protecting the Kurds. That’s good.”
Kurdish scholar Diliman Abdulkader told JNS, “President Trump must understand that Kurds are angels. These angels defeated [the ISIS] caliphate, protected ethnic and religious minorities, brought stability to a third of Syria … 11,000 angels sacrificed their lives so the rest of the world can be at peace.”
“Oh, my goodness gracious, the Kurds are our friends and our allies … abandoning them was a very dark moment in American history,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) in response to Trump’s latest remarks.