U.S. to send more forces to the Middle East while Trump vows withdrawal

The Pentagon said it’s ramping up the deployment of U.S. forces to the Middle East to “assure and enhance the defense of Saudi Arabia” against Iran at the same time President Trump has vowed to start bringing troops home from the region.

The Pentagon plans to dispatch about 1,800 additional troops to Saudi Arabia, officials said. Combined with other recent deployments, about 3,000 personnel are being sent or are having their missions extended in the Mideast, they said. Since May, an additional 14,000 U.S. personnel are in the region, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said Friday.

The deployment to Saudi Arabia comes as Trump and his top aides defended his decision to pull back some U.S. forces in northern Syria, a move that cleared the way for Turkey to send its forces into the country and attack American-allied Kurdish militias. Esper, speaking to reporters at the Pentagon, said most U.S. troops remain “co-located” with Kurdish-led forces in northern Syria.

“We are not abandoning our Kurdish partner forces,” Esper said at a briefing alongside Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley.

The latest deployment appeared at odds with statements Trump has made repeatedly in recent days about pulling U.S. forces out of “endless wars” in the Mideast.

“It’s time to bring them home,” Trump said at a rally in Minneapolis on Thursday night. “We’ve done our job, we’ve defeated everyone that we’re supposed to defeat.”

Esper and Milley said they’ve told their Turkish counterparts that they oppose Ankara’s attacks in northern Syria and said the U.S. never “greenlighted” the operation despite the White House announcement Sunday that American troops “would no longer be in the immediate area” if Turkey moved into Syria. Amid denunciations, including from many Republican lawmakers, Trump later said he had warned Turkey that the incursion was “a bad idea.”

Esper and Milley are likely to face tough questioning on whether Trump served as an enabler for Turkey’s incursion when they testify in a closed session of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday on “The Situation in Syria and the Wider Region.”

So far, Milley estimated, Turkey has sent hundreds of ground troops into the region to work with as many as 1,000 members of the Syrian Free Army but has primarily attacked with fighter jets, armed drones, artillery and tank fire. He called the Turkish operation on the ground “relatively limited.”

Crude oil prices were already climbing after a pair of explosions on an Iranian oil tanker in the Red Sea on Friday. The Islamic Republic’s tanker company initially said the attacks probably came from Saudi Arabia, but later withdrew the claim.

The deployment to Saudi Arabia announced Friday will include a previously previewed delivery of additional Patriot and THAAD missile defense systems that were initially held in reserve. The two systems will provide Saudi Arabia a layered air defense to intercept ballistic missiles at different altitudes and distances, extending coverage.

Esper said that move was in response to last month’s missile and drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities, a strike the U.S., Saudi Arabia and some European nations have blamed on Iran.