“We are just about finished with the campaign along the Euphrates to defeat the last territorial holdings of the ‘caliphate’. They’re down to a few hundred fighters and less than a square kilometre of land,” said Jeffrey, the US Special Representative for Syria Engagement and Special Envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS .
The participants of the conference recognise that this is not just a human crisis this has a cause, and that is the behaviour of Assad regime and those who support it, he said.
Jeffrey said there is "no timetable" for the US withdrawal and confirmed that a smaller force would remain.
Jeffrey said the United States was helping the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Syria to secure ISIS prisoners but was also launching a campaign to get countries to take back foreign fighters and their families, to prosecute or re-educate them.
We believe that there’s between 15,000 and 20,000 Daesh armed adherents active, although many are in sleeper cells, in Syria and in Iraq, Jeffrey said.
Speaking to reporters on a video call after attending a Syria humanitarian conference in Brussels, Jeffrey said the struggle to defeat ISIS ideology would go on and there was no timetable for a full US withdrawal from Syria.
Some troops would be pulled out but a contingent would stay in northeastern Syria, backed by coalition partners and control of air space, to continue the fight and prevent a destabilising vacuum developing.
The United States would also maintain a force at al-Tanf close to the Iraqi and Jordanian borders to bolster local forces against ISIS.
With a smaller force and much less combat after the territorial defeat of IS in Syria, US costs would be far less, he said. In 2018, US military operations in Syria cost about $2 billion out of a total defence budget of $700 billion, mainly expenditure on precision-guided munitions.
Based on Reuters
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