{"id":16400,"date":"2018-09-26T10:26:13","date_gmt":"2018-09-26T10:26:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=16400"},"modified":"2018-09-26T10:26:13","modified_gmt":"2018-09-26T10:26:13","slug":"erdogan-turkish-court-will-decide-fate-of-detained-us-pastor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=16400","title":{"rendered":"Erdogan: Turkish court will decide fate of detained US pastor"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\nWASHINGTON: Six months after President Donald Trump said he wants US troops out of Syria, his top officials are hammering home what has become increasingly obvious: the US isn\u2019t going anywhere.
Trump administration members say there can be no troop pull-out until the Daesh is permanently defeated \u2014 a subjective metric for a stubborn insurgency where the militants have shown tenacity in clinging to their last pockets of terrain.
The US military has been involved in Syria since late 2014 and now has more than 2,000 troops in the country, mainly working to train and advise local Kurdish and Syrian Arab fighters.
With broad gains on the battlefield and the defeat of Daesh` looking inevitable, Trump in March said he wanted US troops out of Syria \u201cvery soon,\u201d later adding the mission would come to a \u201crapid end.\u201d
But Defense Secretary Jim Mattis warned that quitting Syria too fast would be a \u201cstrategic blunder\u201d and James Jeffrey, the US special representative for Syria engagement, this month said the US was \u201cnot in a hurry\u201d to leave the war-torn nation.
\u201cGetting rid of the \u2018caliphate\u2019 doesn\u2019t mean you then blindly say okay, we got rid of it, march out, and then wonder why the \u2018caliphate\u2019 comes back,\u201d Mattis told Pentagon reporters this week.
\u201cThis is not a conventional war where you raise a flag over the enemy\u2019s capital and they sign a peace treaty. It\u2019s not that kind of an enemy.\u201d
Then on Monday, Trump\u2019s national security adviser John Bolton, a long-time Iran hawk, pushed the idea of a US withdrawal even further off, tying such an event to Iran\u2019s actions in Syria.
\u201cWe\u2019re not going to leave (Syria) as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders,\u201d he told reporters.
\u201cThat includes Iranian proxies and militias,\u201d he added.
With war still raging in Afghanistan 17 years since the US-led invasion, and thousands of US troops stationed in Iraq after the US invaded in 2003, the prospect of a yet another open-ended engagement worries some.
\u201cUS policy is now to stay in Syria as long as Iran stays, and Iran doesn\u2019t seem to be in a hurry to leave, and there is the chance for escalation, or accidents, involving Russian forces,\u201d Andrew Parasiliti of the RAND Corporation said.
On September 17, Syrian air defenses accidentally shot down a Russian military plane over the Mediterranean, killing all 15 crew members, as Israel was carrying out a raid on a Syrian army facility.
Moscow has blamed Israel for the incident, saying its pilots used the Russian plane as \u201ccover\u201d while conducting the air strike.
France on Monday warned that the Middle East risks endless war unless a peace agreement can be reached in Syria.
Syrian President Bashar Assad and \u201cthose who support him have a responsibility to work for a political solution,\u201d French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told reporters at the United Nations.
\u201cIf not, we risk heading toward a sort of perpetual war in the area,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON: Six months after President Donald Trump said he wants US troops out of Syria, his top officials are hammering home what has become increasingly obvious: the US isn\u2019t going anywhere.Trump administration members say there can be no troop pull-out until the Daesh is permanently defeated \u2014 a subjective metric for a stubborn insurgency where…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":16401,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16400\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}