Former CIA Director John Brennan on Wednesday said ISIS is “not destroyed,” despite President Trump’s Twitter announcement about the terror group’s demise.
Brennan’s take came after morning reports that U.S. troops would be withdrawn from Syria.
“No, we’ve destroyed a lot of it because of some very hard work by the United States and our partner forces over the last several years,” Brennan said during an interview with MSNBC when asked if ISIS had been conquered. “But it is not destroyed. It still has a presence in the eastern part of Syria as well as western Iraq. It has gone to ground, but it is by no means defeated completely.”
“This is very typical of the Trump administration and that is policy by tweet,” Brennan added.
Brennan said that although there are only 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria to eradicate ISIS as part of Operation Roundup, the “returns are significant.”
[Read more: Trump’s special envoy for Syria flatly contradicted him last week: ‘Reckless’ to declare victory and leave]
Reports emerged Wednesday morning that U.S. troops would pull out of Syria, and Trump later tweeted that ISIS had been wiped out.
“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” Trump tweeted Wednesday.
The Pentagon later said that although troops were being removed from Syria, efforts to eliminate ISIS had not concluded. “The coalition has liberated the ISIS-held territory, but the campaign against ISIS is not over,” Pentagon spokesperson Dana White said in a statement.
“We have started the process of returning U.S. troops home from Syria as we transition to the next phase of the campaign,” White said, noting, “For force protection and operational security reasons we will not provide further details.”
