Wednesday 21 / May / 2025
Washington: US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo vowed on Monday that the IS militant group would not be allowed to regroup as he headed to the Middle East following President Donald Trump's surprise decision to pull US troops from Syria.
Leaving on a trip to eight Arab capitals, Pompeo told reporters he would show that "the United States is still committed to all the missions that we've signed up for with them over the past two years."
The trip comes weeks after Trump announced that the United States would quickly pull its 2,000 soldiers out of Syria, declaring that the IS militant group, had been defeated.
His advisers have since been walking back his timeline, with national security adviser John Bolton saying on Monday in Jerusalem that the United States would verify that the group is truly defeated before withdrawing.
Highlighting that IS emerged during the tenure of Trump's predecessor Barack Obama, Pompeo said the campaign to destroy the movement's self-styled caliphate in war-battered Syria has been "enormously successful."
"And I am confident that we will continue to ensure that the kind of rise that IS had under the Obama administration doesn't occur again," he said on his plane as he started his longest trip since taking over as top US diplomat last year.
Promises from Turkey
One of the rare US partners to support the US withdrawal from Syria has been Turkey, whose president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, spoke to Trump before the US leader's December 19 decision.
Pompeo, in an interview before his departure, said that Erdogan has given assurances to Trump not to attack US-allied Kurdish forces who fought IS in Syria.
"President Erdogan made a commitment to President Trump as the two of them were discussing what this ought to look like — that the Turks would continue the counter-IS campaign after our departure and that the Turks would ensure that the folks that we'd fought with, that had assisted us in the counter-IS campaign, would be protected," Pompeo told CNBC television.
Bolton is set to hold talks on Tuesday in Turkey after meetings in Israel.
