President Donald Trump's administration, which abruptly announced in December that it was pulling out of Syria, said Thursday that it will keep 200 U.S. troops in the country for now.
"A small peace keeping group of about 200 will remain in Syria for period of time," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a one-sentence statement.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who had harshly criticized Trump's decision to pull U.S. forces out of Syria, applauded the president's decision to leave a few hundred as part of an "international stabilizing force."
Graham said it will ensure that Turkey will not get into a conflict with Syrian Democratic Forces, which helped the United States fight Islamic State militants. Turkey views Kurdish members of the Syrian Democratic Forces as terrorists.
Moreover, Graham said leaving a small force in Syria will serve as a check on Iranian ambitions and help ensure that Islamic State fighters do not try to return.
"A safe zone in Syria made up of international forces is the best way to achieve our national security objectives of continuing to contain Iran, ensuring the enduring defeat of ISIS, protecting our Turkish allies, and securing the Turkish border with Syria," Graham said, using an acronym for the Islamic State.
Trump's decision to pull 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria, which he initially said would be rapid but later slowed down, shocked U.S. allies and angered the Kurds in Syria, who are vulnerable to attack by Turkey. It also prompted the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis and drew criticism in Congress. Sen. Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, called the decision a "betrayal of our Kurdish partners."
Many believe the Islamic State threat won't end with the pocket's recapture and an insurgency is underway. In a foreboding sign Thursday, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for back-to-back suicide attacks that hit a village miles away, leaving more than a dozen people dead in a rare targeting of civilians.
It's unclear where the 200 remaining U.S. troops will be stationed.
The U.S. military has a limited network of bases inside Syria. Troops work mostly out of small camps in remote parts of the country's northeast.
Also, U.S. troops are among 200 to 300 coalition troops at a garrison in southern Syria known as al-Tanf, where they train and accompany local Syrian opposition forces on patrols to counter the IS group. Al-Tanf is on a vital road linking Iranian-backed forces from Tehran all the way to southern Lebanon -- and Israel's doorstep.
Trump spoke Thursday with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
"On Syria, the two presidents agreed to continue coordinating on the creation of a potential safe zone," the White House said in a statement about the call.
The White House also said acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Joseph Dunford will be hosting their Turkish counterparts in Washington this week for further talks.
The Syrian Democratic Forces is currently involved in a standoff over the final sliver of land held by the Islamic State in eastern Syria, close to the Iraq border.
A few hundred people -- many of them women and children -- were evacuated Wednesday from the group's tiny tent camp on the banks of the Euphrates River, signaling 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 Islamic State 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. It wasn't clear how many civilians remain holed up inside, along with the militants.
More trucks were sent in Thursday to the tip of a corridor leading to the camp to evacuate more people, but Associated Press journalists on the ground outside Baghouz said no civilians emerged.
Meanwhile, the U.S.-backed Syrian forces handed over more than 150 Iraqi members of the group to Iraq, an Iraqi security official said Thursday.
Information for this article was contributed by Deb Riechmann, Robert Burns and Zeina Karam of The Associated Press.
A Section on 02/22/2019