ISIS/MILITARY/SYRIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “The drama of U.S. and allied missile strikes on Syria has obscured a sobering fact: The U.S.-led campaign to eliminate the Islamic State from Syria has stalled. The U.S. has 2,000 troops in Syria assisting local Arab and Kurdish fighters against IS, even as President Donald Trump resists deeper U.S. involvement and is eager to withdraw completely in coming months. Trump wants ‘other people’ to deal with Syria, whose civil war has spawned the greatest humanitarian crisis since World War II in terms of refugees. It’s unclear whether Trump will go ahead with a total U.S. withdrawal while IS retains even a small presence in Syria. Since January, when Trump asserted in his State of the Union address that ‘very close to 100 percent’ of IS territory in Syria and Iraq had been liberated, progress toward extinguishing the extremists’ caliphate, or self-proclaimed state, has ground to a halt and shows no sign of restarting. U.S. warplanes continue to periodically bomb remaining pockets of IS in eastern Syria, but ground operations by U.S. partner forces have slowed.”
-Robert Burns, “After Syria missile strikes, US stuck in holding pattern,” The Associated Press, April 19, 2018 10:49 am