Trump shocks allies and advisers with plan to pull US troops out of Syria"

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/19/us-troops-syria-withdrawal-trump

"...Trump’s claim is at odds with his own administration’s assessments. In August this year, the Pentagon assessed there were still as many as 14,500 Isis fighters still in Syria.

“That’s intelligence that presumably sat on Trump’s desk while he proclaims victory this morning,” said Charles Lister, director of countering terrorism and extremism at the Middle East Institute, who pointed out that Isis had claimed responsibility for an attack in its former stronghold of Raqqa only minutes before Trump’s tweet."

[snip]

"The UK’s junior defence minister, Tobias Ellwood, flatly refuted Trump’s claim that Isis had been defeated in Syria.

“I strongly disagree. It has morphed into other forms of extremism and the threat is very much alive,” Ellwood said in a tweet on Wednesday.

Trump’s own national security adviser, John Bolton, is adamantly opposed to the decision, for different reasons. At the UN general assembly in September Bolton declared: “We’re not going to leave as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders and that includes Iranian proxies and militias.” A diplomatic source described him as “livid” about the president’s decision."

He is such a fucking disaster.

We really couldn’t ever figure out how to play in that mess.

But yes there are still some isis strongholds left.

ISIS is a bunch of mobsters pretending to have a religious agenda.

The Taliban really IS a religious wacko group. And fellow Muslims looked the other way when they peddled drugs because it was "for Allah." Penalties for drug offenses are high in the Middle East--unless you are religious. That is why ISIS is so insidious. The same conservative clerics who would shit bricks over selling women into slavery will look the other way if they think the mobsters are on their side.