We originally had planned to offer a deconstruction of one of President Trump’s Four-Pinocchio tweets over the weekend, as an example of how many things the president can get wrong in fewer than 280 characters. But then the president had his wild Cabinet session with reporters, and we shifted course.“I don’t want to leave troops there. It’s very dangerous for — you know, we had 28 troops, as it turned out. People said 50. It was 28. And you had an army on both sides of those troops. Those troops could have been wiped out.”
It was Trump that had said 50 troops. But these tiny numbers belie the fact that Trump ordered the withdrawal of about 1,000 U.S. troops from northeastern Syria from about a dozen bases and outposts scattered across the region, where they worked alongside Syrian Kurdish partners. The hasty withdrawal, prompted by Trump’s decision to let Turkey invade, meant many of these bases had to be quickly abandoned.
View the complete October 22 article by Glenn Kessler on The Washington Post website here.