ISIS Will Resurge as Trump Walks Away From Syria, Mattis Warns

(Bloomberg) -- Former U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who left the job last year when Donald Trump suddenly withdrew most U.S. forces from Syria, said Islamic State isn’t snuffed out, as the president thinks.

“We may want a war over; we may even declare it over,” Mattis said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to be broadcast on Sunday. “You can pull your troops out -- as President Obama learned the hard way, out of Iraq -- but the ‘enemy gets the vote,’ we say in the military.”

Trump’s decision last week to pull remaining U.S. troops from helping out Kurdish fighters, which allowed Turkey’s immediate ground offensive against the Kurds in northeastern Syria, has led to a “situation of disarray,” said the former Marine Corps general who once led U.S. Central Command.

Trump has said in recent days that it’s time to bring U.S. troops home because they’ve done their job defeating “everyone that we’re supposed to defeat.” But Mattis said that’s not really the case.

“If we don’t keep the pressure on, then ISIS will resurge,” Mattis said in a partial transcript provided by NBC. “It’s absolutely a given that they will come back.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Jesse Hamilton in Washington at jhamilton33@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Ludden at jludden@bloomberg.net, Ros Krasny

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