Israel will escalate its fight against Iranian-aligned forces in Syria after the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday.
"We will continue to act very aggressively against Iran's efforts to entrench itself in Syria," he said in a statement. "We do not intend to reduce our efforts. We will intensify them, and I know that we do so with the full support and backing of the United States."
On Wednesday, Netanyahu said Israel will study Washington's decision to pull its forces from Syria and will ensure its own security.
"I spoke with U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday and with American Secretary of State Mike Pompeo yesterday [Tuesday]. The American administration told me that it is the president's intention to withdraw their forces from Syria.
"They made it clear that they have other ways of expressing their influence in the area. This is, of course, an American decision. We will study its timetable, how it will be implemented and – of course – its implications for us. In any case, we will take care to maintain the security of Israel and to defend ourselves in this sector," Netanyahu said.
The Pentagon said Wednesday that the process of withdrawing had already begun, while a U.S. official said that the full redeployment would take between 60 and 100 days.
"The Coalition has liberated the ISIS-held territory, but the campaign against ISIS is not over," Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said in a statement, using an acronym for Islamic State.
"We have started the process of returning U.S. troops home from Syria as we transition to the next phase of the campaign," she said.
"For force protection and operational security reasons we will not provide further details. We will continue working with our partners and allies to defeat ISIS wherever it operates."
The Russian Foreign Ministry said the U.S. decision to withdraw creates prospects for a political settlement to the yearslong, bloody Syrian civil war.
The TASS news agency cited the ministry as saying that an initiative to form a Syrian constitutional committee had a bright future with the U.S. troop withdrawal.
Russia is a key backer of Syrian President Bashar Assad, and Russian President Vladimir Putin's support is believed by many to have turned the tide of the war in Assad's favor.
Trump tweeted that the troops would be leaving as the U.S. had defeated ISIS, which he said was his sole reason for being in Syria.
But in the U.K., a junior minister in the Defense Ministry Tobias Ellwood used Trump's favored means of communication to express his disapproval of the decision.
"I strongly disagree," Ellwood tweeted in response to Trump's claim that Islamic State had been defeated. He warned that the organization "has morphed into other forms of extremism and the threat is very much alive."
In the U.S., senior members of Trump's own Republican Party denounced the decision as having a far-reaching, negative impact.
Withdrawing the troops, said Senator Lindsey Graham, a recent staunch supporter of the president, would be "a big win for ISIS, Iran, Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Russia."
