“I won’t back down. I’m decisive, we will pull out”

[Swordsmyth]

New details have emerged related to a phone call between President Trump and his Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday over the US planned Syria troop pullout, which Turkish presidential office sources say Trump reaffirmed his commitment to carrying out. Unknown up to this point was a segment of the conversation reportedly focused on the devastating ISIS suicide attack on an American patrol deep inside Manbij in northern Syria last Wednesday, which killed four Americans and 15 others.
Turkish sources say President Trump agreed with Erdogan's assessment that the rare Jan. 16 attack was a "provocation" carried out in order to influence Trump's Syria pullout decision.


According to a senor Turkish official with knowledge of the call, Trump said, “I won’t back down. I’m decisive, we will pull out” — in spite of Congressional hawks and media pundits immediately seizing on the tragic terror attack to argue US forces must stay in Syria indefinitely.
Though the US side has not confirmed the Turkish statements, an explosive report in Middle East Eye suggests Trump is fully aware that both the timing and location of the terror attack appear designed to ratchet up pressure on the White House to reverse its prior troop draw down order, leaving the door wide open for yet another endless American quagmire in the Middle East, and allow for remnant ISIS cells to mount an insurgency on the some 2,000+ US forces there.
According to the Middle East Eye report:

US President Donald Trump told his Turkish counterpart on Sunday that the United States wasn’t going to reverse its decision to withdraw militarily from Syria, even after an attack in the city of Manbij last week claimed the lives of four US servicemen, five local fighters, and 10 civilians.
According to a senior Turkish official, who spoke to Middle East Eye on condition of anonymity due to government protocol, Trump said that he agreed with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan’s assessment that the attack was a provocation that aimed to influence the pullout decision.

Though Turkey has been notorious in spinning and imposing its own wishful version of events related to US actions and intentions in Syria, US official sources have confirmed Erdogan attempted to convince Trump the "provocation" was essentially a trap into which he must not fall.

More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-...al-provocation

[AuH20]

Imagine Jeb or Marco as president.

[Swordsmyth]

Imagine Jeb or Marco as president.

I'd rather have Hitlery than either of those two, at least then a revolution might breakout.

[Superfluous Man]

The question isn't whether or not something will happen that he will count as the fulfillment of his promise. It's whether or not he'll have to twist the language around like he did with the Mexico paying for the wall bit in order to say so.

[Zippyjuan]

Campaign: we will be there until we bomb the crap out of and get rid of ISIS.
March 2018. We will leave "soon".
December 19th, 2018. We will be gone in 30 days.
Still nothing.

Seems pretty "decisive" to me.

[Zippyjuan]

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/y...led-in-manbij/

ISIS car bomb targets US troops in Syria one week after four Americans were killed in Manbij

U.S. and local partner forces were attacked Monday by what appears to have been a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device in northeastern Syria.

Both the U.S. and its Syrian Democratic Force allies denied any casualties resulted from the incident, although local Kurdish news media reported immediately after the incident that one U.S. service member and some local security forces were “slightly injured.”

The ISIS-affiliated Amaq News Agency took responsibility for the attack.

“We can confirm a combined U.S. and Syrian partner force convoy was involved in an apparent VBIED attack today in Syria. There were no U.S. casualties," Army Col. Sean Ryan, a spokesman for the coalition to defeat the Islamic State, said in a statement.

The attack occurred on a road outside Al-Shaddadi, a town in Syria’s Al-Hasakah province. The location is a roughly five-hour drive east of the site of the last bomb attack against U.S. troops in the town of Manbij. Al-Shaddadi was liberated from ISIS in February 2016.

The targeted vehicle shown in pictures taken by local news media appears to be a Lenco BearCat. Commercial, off-the-shelf versions of those vehicles were approved as U.S. military aid to the SDF in September 2017.

SDF press officials said in a statement that the VBIED was detonated prior to reaching the convoy.