That will make the NRA happy.
Trump Foundation, the personal piggy bank of a charity being investigated in New York over an alleged long history of illegalities, is being wound up as part of an arrangement with the NY Attorney General.
Credit where credit is due. A Republican administration ordering destruction of a gun attachment is a rarity.
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Good on Trump. Well done.
Actually, it may. The gun industry’s sales have been through the floor since Trump was elected as gun nuts stopped worrying about having their guns stolen or not being able to buy them. This may energise gun sales again.
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I was being slightly facetious.
It is a welcome move.
And I was being cynical and pointing out that this move may be beneficial for the gun manufacturers, which is why it may have been done.
Trump pulling troops out of Syria - very well done and a commendable decision
I’m not that cynical.
If there was more to it than it being the right thing to do then it was likely because it was an easy win for a man desperately in need of wins after a torrid few weeks.
America’s number one idiot creates chaos again.
Trump shocks allies and advisers with plan to pull US troops out of Syria
Administration nears end of campaign to retake territory once held by Isis as Trump tweets: ‘We have defeated Isis in Syria’
A member of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), backed by US special forces, stands on a building near Raqqa’s stadium in October last year. Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump is reported to have ordered a full, rapid withdrawal of over 2,000 US troops in Syria, declaring victory over the Islamic State, and taking allies and his own advisers by surprise.
Pentagon and state department officials were left scrambling to interpret an abrupt change in course from the US policy decided over the summer to keep forces in Syria to ensure the “enduring defeat of Isis” and act as a bulwark against Iranian influence.
Senior officials were informed of the president’s decision on Tuesday night, and after news reports of the U-turn surfaced on Wednesday morning, Trump tweeted: “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.”
Trump’s claim is at odds with his own administration’s assessments. In August this year, the Pentagon assessed there were still as many as 14,500 Isis fighters still in Syria.
“That’s intelligence that presumably sat on Trump’s desk while he proclaims victory this morning,” said Charles Lister, director of countering terrorism and extremism at the Middle East Institute, who pointed out that Isis had claimed responsibility for an attack in its former stronghold of Raqqa only minutes before Trump’s tweet.
Later on Wednesday morning, the White House spokeswoman, Sarah Sanders, put out a more nuanced statement saying that troop withdrawal marked the start of the “next phase” in the struggle with Isis, and suggested they could return if necessary.
“Five years ago, Isis was a very powerful and dangerous force in the Middle East, and now the United States has defeated the territorial caliphate,” Sanders said. “ We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign.”
A senior administration official said that the timetable for withdrawal was being decided.
“We we will do the repositioning of troops and assets in an orderly fashion,” the official said, adding that the timetable was being designed by the Pentagon.
After the Trump tweet and the White House statement, the state department cancelled a scheduled press briefing. After initially insisting that nothing had changed, the Pentagon put out its own statement echoing the White House language about the “next phase of the campaign” against Isis, but saying it had only “started the process” of withdrawal, and giving no timetable.
Reuters quoted a US official as saying the troop pullout would take between 60 and 100 days.
Behind the scenes, the Pentagon leadership was still trying to persuade the president to accept a managed, more gradual withdrawal, according to sources familiar with the discussions.
NGO’s supporting US agencies bringing water and sanitation back to the ruined town of Raqqa were told on Wednesday morning to make plans for rapid departure, according to Nicholas Heras, a fellow at the Centre for a New American Security.
“This is a chaotic decision, hastily made with no consultation with anyone responsible for the actual nuts and bolts of withdrawal,” Heras said. “Everyone feels like they are caught in a moment of chaos. They have been caught with their pants down.”
The state department declined to comment, for “operational and security reasons”, on a Reuters report that its personnel in Syria had been told to evacuate within 24 hours. US state department and aid workers are heavily involved in the stabilisation effort in Raqqa and other towns recaptured from Isis.
An abrupt US withdrawal would mean abandoning Washington’s closest ally inside Syria, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which has done most of the fighting in clearing Isis fighters out of its strongholds. They are being threatened with a cross-border offensive from Turkey, which sees them as indistinguishable from Kurdish Workers’ party (PKK) militants inside Turkey.
Trump talked to the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, by phone on Friday, and Erdogan later said he had received some “positive answers” from his US counterpart on the tense situation in the northeastern Syria.
The state department later said it had approved the sale of Patriot ground-to-air missiles to Turkey, while Sanders said Trump would “take a look” at Ankara’s demand for the extradition of Fethullah Gülen, a dissident Turkish cleric living in the US.
Trump has called for immediate withdrawal from Syria before, but had previously been persuaded by allies and his advisers to stay on to finish the fight against Isis and to contain Iran. His own administration believes that Isis still has a residual but significant presence inside Syria.
“We are well along in clearing Isis from the ground that they’ve held in Syria [but] we still have a lot of work to do in terms of the stabilisation phase,” the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Joseph Dunford, said earlier this month. Dunford said US soldiers had only progressed 20% along the way towards its target of training up to 40,000 local fighters to keep Isis in check.
Both the UK and France have small numbers of special forces in north-eastern Syria.
The UK’s junior defence minister, Tobias Ellwood, flatly refuted Trump’s claim that Isis had been defeated in Syria.
“I strongly disagree. It has morphed into other forms of extremism and the threat is very much alive,” Ellwood said in a tweet on Wednesday.
Trump’s own national security adviser, John Bolton, is adamantly opposed to the decision, for different reasons. At the UN general assembly in September Bolton declared: “We’re not going to leave as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders and that includes Iranian proxies and militias.” A diplomatic source described him as “livid” about the president’s decision.
A senior administration official shrugged off questions about the very different messages coming from Trump and his top advisers.
“It was the president decision to make and he made it,” the official said. “He gets to do that. That’s his prerogative.”
Lindsey Graham, a senior Republican senator who is a Trump loyalist on most issues, denounced the decision, calling it “an Obama-like mistake made by the Trump administration”, Graham said in a statement, adding that the US troops in Syria are “vital to our national security interests”.
“There will be much resentment and feeling of abandonment that will be directed toward American personnel,” Graham said in a later tweet. “The confusion surrounding our Syria policy is making life much more difficult and dangerous for Americans in the region.”
The defence secretary, James Mattis, has consistently argued that the US troops served a vital national interest by maintaining the offensive against residual Isis pockets and a signal of intent not to cede Syria to Iranian control.
A large US base at Tanf near the Iraqi border has been used as a buffer against Iranian proxies who covet the area as a land corridor linking Iran to Damascus. An evacuation of that base would signal a decision that maintaining that buffer was no longer a national security priority.
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Not surprising. Now allows Russia to exert more influence in Syria.
Vlad must have made a call to Donnie.
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If such a train of thought takes your fancy then for fuel shovel in that the admin has just signaled that they will be lifting sanctions on companies belonging to Oleg Deripaska.
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Erdogan will call it a ‘good decision’.
The Kurds wont.
What does it matter? The U.S has no business being in Syria, nor the ME for that matter.
The answer is in the comment you just quoted: now Russia will have more influence in Syria.
Fair enough. Got any thoughts on Russia having a presence there as well?
They already do, it is why Asad is still in power, and they have set up a port there.
Even if you believe that, there are ways to pull out that don’t shitt on everyone you have been working with on the way out. Trump is an ignorant amateur who is helping no one bar himself behaving like this.
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Wouldn’t matter how he did it, people will still bag the crap out of him and say it is wrong.
Most in here have called for the US to get out of the area and stop meddling, now that they do, suddenly it is wrong to do so.
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TBH I didn’t even realise the US was in Syria. The 2,000 troops probably don’t make a huge difference either way.
Ok, whatever.
Seems you approve of leaving all your allies, associated service providers etc in the lurch.
I think it’s wrong.
Leave by all means, but do it an organised, sensible fashion.
This is appealing to his base regardless of cost.
High level muppetry.
Who are they ‘■■■■■■■■ on’ exactly? You have no idea if you think the U.S pulling out of Syria adversely affects that region.
Assad and Russia have comprehensively won the war against ISIS/Al Nusra Front with most of the country being liberated.
U.S presence has only meant increased devastation from jihadists whom they are funding and arming to overthrow Assad.
And I will remind you that Russia is there at the behest of Assad.
I know…
I just said they did. FO50 said that the US shouldn’t be there. Should Russia?