President Trump offered no verbal support this afternoon for Kurdish allies he is accused of abandoning, as Turkey begins to invade Syria.
Instead, Trump said they have “wanted to fight, and that’s the way it is.”
Trump also said ISIS fighters in the region are “going to be escaping to Europe.”
Trump says Turkey is now responsible for keeping ISIS fighters in prison in the region.
“Well they’re going to be escaping to Europe, that’s where they want to go, they want to go back to their homes. But Europe didn’t want them from us. We could have given it to them, they could have trials, they could have done whatever they wanted. But as usual, it’s not reciprocal.” Trump said.
Trump made the comments in the White House’s Roosevelt Room today, after signing executive orders related to regulatory reforms.
Experts and even some of the president’s staunchest allies on Capitol Hill have blasted Trump for ordering U.S. troops to withdraw from northern Syria, leaving Kurdish allies who banded with the U.S. in the fight against ISIS to fend for themselves.
Turkey is already launching military attacks in northern Syria.
“Pray for our Kurdish allies who have been shamelessly abandoned by the Trump administration. This move ensures the reemergence of ISIS,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the president’s most ardent defenders, tweeted today.
Pray for our Kurdish allies who have been shamelessly abandoned by the Trump Administration. This move ensures the reemergence of ISIS.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) October 9, 2019
A sustained Turkish military operation against U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in Syria would vastly increase the threat to Americans from the Islamic State militant group, which remains intent on attacking the West, current and former intelligence officials tell NBC News.
The immediate concern, officials say, is what will happen with the 12,000 ISIS fighters currently being guarded by the American-backed Kurds.
The ISIS prisoners are the world’s largest concentration of terrorists.
If those fighters are set free, officials fear a replay of what happened in Iraq between 2010 and 2013, when the core group who founded ISIS were released or escaped from detention after U.S. forces left the country.
Some of the very people who broke out of Iraqi prisons helped turn ISIS into a movement that not only seized territory in Iraq and Syria, but also orchestrated and encouraged terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States.
More broadly, current and former officials say, a large Turkish military incursion into northern Syria will have the effect of removing the single greatest source of counterterrorism pressure against ISIS — a Kurdish force that has been crucial to defeating and containing the terror group.