Gen. Jack Keane: Trump deserves credit for defeating ISIS in Syria
Retired four-star Gen. Jack Keane said President Trump deserves credit for defeating ISIS in Syria.
“The caliphate essentially has been destroyed. The Islamic State in terms of controlling territory no longer exists," he told FOX Business' Susan Li on Trish Regan Primetime on Wednesday. "The President and his national security team and certainly our soldiers who participated in this and leaders deserve a huge amount of credit.”
Keane added that Trump's achievement surpassed his expectations.
"They took a system that [President] Obama gave them that wasn’t making a lot of progress and accelerated it rather quite dramatically," he said.
President Trump, on Wednesday, while speaking to reporters at the White House, showed a map of ISIS's defeat since his election in 2016 and proclaimed that the caliphate would be "gone by tonight."
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The President agreed to leave 400 U.S. troops in Syria after withdrawing most U.S. forces from the country. In Keane's opinion the remaining American presence is crucial.
“We’re going to keep some of our forces still there, somewhere between 400 to 1,000, a very modest amount, to continue to assist the 60,000 Syrian democratic forces who do the fighting," he said. "And along with our airpower we’re going to control the air space over Eastern Syria to ensure that ISIS does not remerge.”