Trump says US to withdraw from Syria

Military operation in eastern Ghouta 'nearly over', Russia's Lavrov says

RICHFIELD, Ohio - US President Donald Trump insisted on Thursday that US forces would pull out of Syria "very soon" and lamented what he said was Washington's waste of $7 trillion in Middle East wars.

In an address to industrial workers in Ohio, Trump said forces with US help were close to securing all of the territory that the Islamic State group once claimed.

"We'll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now," he promised, to applause.

"Very soon - very soon we're coming out. We're going to have 100 percent of the caliphate, as they call it - sometimes referred to as 'land' - taking it all back quickly, quickly," he said.

"But we're going to be coming out of there real soon. Going to get back to our country, where we belong, where we want to be."

US State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert was later asked at a news conference if she was aware of any decision to pull the US out of Syria.

She responded: "I am not, no. No."

The United States has more than 2,000 military personnel in eastern Syria, working with local militia groups to defeat the IS extremists while trying to keep out of Syria's broader civil war.

Trump's eagerness to quit the conflict flies in the face of a new US Syria strategy announced in January by then secretary of state Rex Tillerson - who has since been sacked.

Tillerson argued that US forces must remain engaged in Syria to prevent the IS group and al-Qaida from returning.

Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Thursday said Syrian forces had "nearly wiped out" rebels in eastern Ghouta.

"As a result of this anti-terrorism operation in eastern Ghouta, terrorist elements have nearly been wiped out of this suburb of the Syrian capital," Lavrov said at news conference in Moscow after meeting UN Syrian envoy Staffan de Mistura.

"Civilian life is going to be re-established there," Lavrov said, adding that "the majority of rebels have been evacuated".

Syrian troops have recaptured more than 90 percent of Ghouta. Thousands of rebels have accepted Russian-brokered deals to leave other parts of the enclave in the past week with their families on government-supplied buses, giving them safe passage to other insurgent-held areas. Tens of thousands of other civilians have stayed behind to accept state rule.

Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said on Thursday negotiations with Jaish al-Islam, the rebel faction in control of the final part of the enclave near Damascus, were continuing.

"There are working group contacts. They contact us, they write letters, they talk on the phone, we meet," he said.

AFP - Reuters - Xinhua