About an hour after the US military confirmed that several American troops were killed in an ISIS-claimed attack in Syria, Vice President Mike Pence declared that “the caliphate has crumbled” and the militant network “has been defeated.”
Pence made no comment about the attack in Manbij and did not offer condolences to the families of the fallen servicemen during his remarks to the Global Chiefs of Mission conference in Washington, CNN reported.
His press secretary said he and President Trump were “monitoring the situation.”
“Our hearts go out to the loved ones of the fallen,” Alyssa Farah tweeted Wednesday morning.
Prior to Wednesday’s attack, only two US troops had been killed in combat in Syria since the start of the American campaign there in 2014.
The attack comes just weeks after Trump announced he was pulling out all 2,000 US troops from Syria because ISIS was defeated, though he later tweeted that the terror group was “largely defeated.”
Trump’s abrupt decision to pull the troops sent shockwaves across the region and led to the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis and the top US envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition.
It also led to major criticism that Washington was abandoning its local Kurdish allies amid Turkish threats of an imminent attack.
The president eventually said the pullout would be more gradual, but on Friday, a military official said the US-led military coalition had begun the process of withdrawing the troops from Syria.
On Wednesday, Pence voiced support for the move.
“Thanks to the leadership of this commander in chief and the courage and sacrifice of our armed forces, we’re now actually able to begin to hand off the fight against ISIS in Syria to our coalition partners and we’re bringing our troops home,” he said.
But he added that the US would “stay in the region and we’ll stay in the fight to ensure that ISIS does not rear its ugly head again. We will protect the gains that our soldiers and our coalition partners have secured.”