In a rare bipartisan vote, Democratic and Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives joined together to voice their dissatisfaction with President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, effectively abandoning Kurdish fighters whom we had allied with during the fight against ISIS.
The resolution passed on Wednesday by a vote of 354 votes in favor of the resolution to 60 votes against it. The text of the measure stated that Trump’s decision to leave Syria abruptly and without warning to Kurdish forces was also “beneficial to adversaries of the United States government,” the New York Times reported.
Before the vote had been recorded, Trump had dismissed the Kurds in Syria, justifying, in part, his decision to withdraw from the region to reporters that the fighters we had allied ourselves with were “not angels,” CBS News reported.
That’s a far cry from what the president had said about the Kurds just a few days prior. On October 8, Trump hailed the Kurds in a tweet, describing them as “special people and wonderful fighters” days after he had made his announcement about troop withdrawal.
Here’s the roll call vote on a resolution opposing the U.S. abandoning Kurdish forces in Syria. Adopted 354-60, with four members voting present.
The 60 Republicans who voted with Trump are, by and large, from some pretty Trump-y districts.https://t.co/bgB55au2dN pic.twitter.com/JDhDKYdvHm
— Matt Fuller (@MEPFuller) October 16, 2019
According to recent polling on the matter, similar to lawmakers in Congress, the American people are not happy with Trump’s decision either. An Economist/YouGov poll on the question of withdrawing from Syria and leaving the Kurds to fend for themselves found that only 28 percent of the country approved of the president’s actions. Meanwhile, a majority (52 percent) said they disapproved of what he had done.
And contrary to what the president has been tweeting as of late, claiming that ISIS had been defeated in the region, a supermajority of respondents disagreed with that assessment, too, with 73 percent of Americans saying ISIS is not yet totally defeated, according to the poll.
At least 10,000 ISIS prisoners were being held by in state prisons in northern Syria, according to CNBC, and as a result of the incursion from Turkey in the north, at least 800 of those prisoners have reportedly escaped so far.