U.S. President Donald Trump said Thursday that a “decision” would be made on U.S. troops in Syria, but gave no further details. He denied that he had said he would withdraw troops from the country.

“I did not say I would withdraw troops from Syria and I don’t know the source of those reports. But we will make a decision on that,” Trump told reporters in response to a question about whether he had said he would withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.

“We are not involved in Syria. Syria is its own mess. They don’t need our involvement,” he added.

The US has recently increased its troop presence in Syria from 900 to around 2,000 following the ouster of Bashar al-Assad’s regime by a coalition of rebels led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) on 8 December. The US justified the increase in numbers as a temporary measure to prevent ISIS from gaining a foothold in the country.

US forces in Syria are the main backers of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which defeated ISIS in 2019 and ended the group’s five-year so-called “caliphate” two years after its defeat in neighbouring Iraq.

Trump: Egypt and Jordan to welcome displaced Palestinians from Gaza

Donald Trump continued to insist yesterday (Thursday) that Jordan and Egypt will welcome displaced Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, even though both Amman and Cairo rejected the population transfer to which the new US president referred.

“We do a lot for them and they will,” the Republican insisted, responding to a reporter who asked him how he thought he could persuade the governments of the two countries to change their position.

He did not give details.

Egyptian head of state Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Jordanian King Abdullah II categorically rejected the idea floated by Donald Trump on Wednesday of transferring Palestinians from Gaza to their countries.

“The displacement and removal of Palestinians from their land is an injustice in which we cannot participate,” the Egyptian president said.

For his part, the monarch of the Hashemite kingdom stressed in a statement “Jordan’s firm position that it is necessary for the Palestinians to remain on their lands” and “to be allowed” to see “their legitimate rights under the two-state solution” realized.

As almost all of the residents (2.4 million) of the Gaza Strip, which remains under Israeli siege, have been forced to flee their homes because of the war that broke out on October 7, 2023, the US president suggested on Saturday that they be transferred to Jordan and Egypt to “clean up” and “settle” the coastal Palestinian enclave, which he likened to a “demolition site.”

On Monday he came back, reaffirming that Palestinians could “live in areas that are safer and probably more comfortable.”

The U.S. president’s proposal has provoked a storm of reaction in the Middle East and Europe.