The US commander leading the fight against ISIS said Friday that he disagrees with President Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria — and cautioned that the terror group was far from defeated, according to a report.
“It would not have been my military advice at that particular time … I would not have made that suggestion, frankly,” Gen. Joseph Votel, commander of US forces in the Middle East, told CNN on Friday about the troop withdrawal.
“(The caliphate) still has leaders, still has fighters, it still has facilitators, it still has resources, so our continued military pressure is necessary to continue to go after that network,” he added.
Speaking from Oman, Votel said he would only have declared that ISIS had been defeated if he was certain the jihadists no longer posed a threat.
“When I say, ‘We have defeated them,’ I want to ensure that means they do not have the capability to plot or direct attacks against the US or our allies,” he said. “They still have this very powerful ideology, so they can inspire.”
In December, Trump abruptly tweeted plans for a pullout from Syria, arguing that ISIS had been defeated, even though his intelligence chiefs have said the group remains a threat.
His announcement on Syria prompted the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis and the senior State Department official in charge of the anti-ISIS campaign.
Votel had previously said he “was not consulted” before Trump’s controversial announcement that the US would rapidly withdraw its troops from Syria.
On Friday, he also said the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces — who launched an offensive days ago to oust ISIS from its only remaining enclave in Syria — could not defeat the militants without continued US assistance.
“They still require our enablement and our assistance with this,” Votel told CNN.
“We want (ISIS) to be able to be controlled or addressed by the indigenous partners, whether that’s the Iraqi security forces in Iraq, or the Syrian Democratic Forces in Syria, that when they are capable of handling this threat on their own, without our assistance, that will be another key criteria indicating to me that we have accomplished our mission of defeat of ISIS.”