Pompeo launches Mideast tour vowing no ‘IS’ return

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrived yesterday in Jordan on a Middle East tour to show commitment to the region after President Donald Trump’s surprise decision to withdraw troops from war-torn Syria. The top US diplomat, on his longest trip since taking the post last year, pledged that the Islamic State group (IS) would not be allowed to regroup following a string of battlefield defeats.

But in a stark reminder of the lingering threat, a war monitor reported that the jihadists had killed 23 US-backed fighters in a counterattack in eastern Syria aimed at defending their last bastion. After setting off on the trip to eight Arab capitals, Pompeo told reporters he would show that “the United States is still committed to all the missions that we’ve signed up for with them over the past two years.”

The eight-day tour comes weeks after Trump announced that the United States would quickly pull its 2,000 soldiers out of Syria, declaring that IS -- also known as ISIS -- had been defeated. His advisers have since been walking back his timeline, with national security adviser John Bolton saying Monday in Jerusalem that the United States would verify that the group is truly beaten before withdrawing.

Highlighting that IS emerged during the tenure of Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama, Pompeo said the campaign to destroy the movement’s selfstyled “caliphate” in war-battered Syria has been “enormously successful.” “And I am confident that we will continue to ensure that the kind of rise that ISIS had under the Obama administration doesn’t occur again,” he said on his plane.

IS hits back

Just hours later the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said IS suicide attackers had hit the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces in eastern Syria, killing 23 of its fighters. IS was unable to hold on to the positions it attacked but the assault which began late Sunday killed 23 SDF members and also left nine jihadists dead, the Britain-based monitor said. Pompeo opened his trip in Jordan and will deliver an address on Middle East policy in Egypt, whose army chief turned president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, has been a key partner of Trump.

He will also visit Manama, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Riyadh, Muscat, Kuwait City, and possibly Baghdad. A major focus of the tour will be sustaining a re - gional coalition to counter Iran. “This is a coalition that understands that the largest threats -- terrorism and the Islamic Republic of Iran -- are things that we ought to work on jointly and we will be marshalling all of the resources, theirs and ours, to achieve them,” Pompeo said.