Trump Visits US Troops in Iraq on Unannounced Trip
By Patsy Widakuswara December 26, 2018
President Donald Trump made an unannounced visit to Iraq on Wednesday to talk with U.S. troops stationed there.
Trump and first lady Melania Trump landed at Al Asad Airbase in western Iraq at 7:16 p.m. local time.
They left Washington late Christmas night, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a tweet Wednesday afternoon.
The trip, Trump's first visit to a conflict zone as president, was undertaken in near secrecy. It came with a quarter of the U.S. government shut down as a result of Congress' inability to agree on funding for Trump's proposed wall along the U.S. border with Mexico.
Trump's visit to Iraq, where in all about 5,200 members of the U.S. military are stationed, also came a day after he held a video conference from the Oval Office with military members around the globe. After the call, he was criticized by some media outlets that said he was the first president since 2002 to not visit U.S. troops at Christmastime.
In Iraq, the president and first lady greeted troops in a dining hall, posing for photos and signing autographs as part of the visit.
The president last week made the controversial move of announcing plans to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. In his remarks to the troops in Iraq, he defended that decision, saying that the Islamic State group had been "very nearly defeated" and that the caliphate was gone.
"I made it clear from the beginning that our mission in Syria was to strip ISIS of its military strongholds,'' Trump said, using an acronym for the militant group.
"Eight years ago, we went there for three months, and we never left," he said, adding the U.S presence in Syria was never meant to be "open-ended."
Trump said Turkey had agreed to eliminate any IS "remnants" in the region.
"The nations of the region must step up and take more responsibility for their future," Trump said, adding there would be an "orderly withdrawal" of the roughly 2,000 U.S. forces in Syria.
In addition to the Syrian pullout, Trump is also considering withdrawing roughly half of the more than 14,000 American troops stationed in Afghanistan, beginning next month.
Trump's senior advisers and military officials have warned that the moves will cause further chaos in the region.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Brett McGurk, special presidential envoy for the global coalition to counter ISIS, both resigned, at least in part, because of disagreement over the Syria and Afghanistan policies.
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