“Like rats, America is running away,” one man shouted in Arabic at the vehicles, shown in a video put out by the Kurdish news agency. The withdrawal, Trump says, aims to get American troops out of the Mideast and “endless wars,” but decisionmakers have stumbled repeatedly over how much really to pull out. The Turkish military said it was responding to Kurdish fire coming from a position about a kilometre (0.6 miles) away from the post. They waited in the flashpoint town of Manbij and strategic Kobani until Syrian forces backed by Russia arrived. The Syrian Kurdish fighters clashed with the approaching Turkish-backed fighters but were vulnerable because of its desert location so they retreated, the SDF official said.

Source: thestar October 22, 2019 15:11 UTC