WarSclerotic

The US military will keep around 200 troops in Syria after US President Donald Trump’s pullout from the war-torn country, the White House said Thursday.

“A small peacekeeping group of about 200 will remain in Syria for a period of time,” White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders said.

The announcement comes amid fierce criticism of Trump’s decision to withdraw America’s 2,000 or so troops from Syria by April 30, with members of his own Republican Party blasting the move.

In December, Trump declared victory over the Islamic State group in Syria, even though thousands of jihadists remain and fighting continues around their last holdout.

Civilians fleeing the Islamic State’s group embattled holdout of Baghouz walk in a field on February 13, 2019. (Delil Souleiman/AFP)

Critics have decried a number of possible outcomes from a precipitous withdrawal, including a Turkish attack on US-backed Kurdish forces and a resurgence of IS.

Israel has repeatedly warned in recent years that Iran is seeking to establish a military presence in Syria, where it is fighting alongside its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah and Russia to restore the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Israeli officials have also warned that America’s absence would open the door for Tehran to create a so-called “land bridge” from Iran, through Iraq and Syria, into Lebanon and to the Mediterranean Sea.

Over the last several years, Israel has carried out hundreds of airstrikes in Syria against targets linked to Iran.

In this Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2015 file photo, relatives and comrades pray as they surround the Hezbollah flag-draped coffins of Shiite fighters who were killed in Syria, during a rally to mark the 13th day of the Shiite mourning period of Muharram, in Nabatiyeh, Lebanon. (AP Photo/Mohammed Zaatari, File)

Sanders did not provide additional details, but the troops’ “peacekeeping” designation could pave the way for European allies to commit forces for such a mission.

Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan visited Europe last week where he attempted to convince allies to maintain a troop presence in Syria after the US pulls out.

In this file photo taken on January 1, 2019 acting US Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan arrives for his first day in his new job at the Pentagon in Washington, DC. (Saul Loeb/AFP)

But he struggled to persuade other countries why they should risk their forces with America gone.

Trump earlier Thursday spoke with Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and the two men discussed Syria, according to a White House summary.

“The two presidents agreed to continue coordinating on the creation of a potential safe zone” in Syria, the readout said.

At the height of its rule, IS imposed its brutal ideology on a territory roughly the size of the United Kingdom, attracting thousands of supporters from abroad.

US President Donald Trump speaks during an event in the Rose Garden at the White House, February 15, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

But the jihadists have since lost almost all their territory save for a tiny sliver of around half a square kilometer (a fifth of a square mile) in the eastern Syrian village of Baghouz.

The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are working towards evacuating civilians remaining in the holdout, so they can polish off the dying IS “caliphate” whether through an assault or a surrender deal.

Syria’s Kurds have long demanded the repatriation of foreigners accused of belonging to IS in their custody, but their home countries have been reluctant.

Arson balloon attacks continued for a second day on Wednesday, as at least three balloons launched from the Gaza Strip landed in Israel or exploded en route, according to one Gaza-bordering local council.

In response, IDF aircraft fired at a group of Palestinians launching the incendiary devices, the Israeli military said Wednesday evening, calling the target a Hamas post from which the airborne devices were launched.

No injuries were reported in the strikes east of the el-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza.

A large bundled cluster of balloons carrying a cardboard model of a drone landed in a field in the Eshkol region on Wednesday afternoon, a spokesperson for the local council said. It was one of the largest airborne devices to reach Israel from the Palestinian territory in months.

Police sappers were called to remove the drone, the Eshkol spokesperson said.

A short time earlier, another balloon with a suspected explosive device was found in an agricultural field in the Eshkol region, which borders Gaza, the local government said.

Police sappers were called to the scene and removed the device.

Also Wednesday, a balloon from Gaza exploded in the air nearby. It is not clear what caused the airborne explosion, though it appears to have been something other than the balloon itself, as the sound was heard by fieldhands working nearby.

A balloon carrying a suspected explosive device from the Gaza Strip touches down in southern Israel on February 20, 2019. (Eshkol Security)

Earlier, a security guard outside a kindergarten in the village of Amikam shot several bullets at a balloon passing by the kindergarten in an attempt to bring it down before it reached the facility. Police units who reached the scene discovered it was an ordinary balloon and posed no danger to the surroundings.

The spate of arson balloon launches followed a Gazan balloon launch on Tuesday that sparked the first brush fire in southern Israel in months.

The blaze burned grasslands in a wooded area outside the community of Kibbutz Kissufim in the Eshkol region. It was quickly extinguished, according to the Israel Fire and Rescue Services.

Initially, the Eshkol Regional Council said the cause of the fire was not immediately known, but it was later confirmed to have been sparked by arson devices from Gaza, a fire department spokesperson said.

A second blaze that was sparked in the Eshkol region around the same time was found to have been an intentional controlled burn, and not the result of a Palestinian incendiary device, according to the fire department.

Grasslands burned in a fire sparked by a balloon carrying an incendiary device from the Gaza Strip in southern Israel on February 19, 2019. (Fire and Rescue Services)

In addition, a helium-filled condom with a suspected explosive device attached to it was found outside another community in the Eshkol region.

In response to the fire, Eshkol Mayor Gadi Yarkoni called on Israelis to question political candidates about how they planned to combat these airborne arson attacks.

“Currently candidates for the Knesset are making statements, tweeting, attending parlor meetings and conferences, and asking for your votes, I call on voters, all citizens of the State of Israel: Ask them — what are your proposals for Gaza and against the terror of balloons?” Yarkoni said in a statement.

The Tuesday balloon attacks came as dozens of Palestinians took part in riots along the northern border of the Gaza Strip, across from Kibbutz Zikim, the army said.

Demonstrators burned tires, threw rocks at soldiers and attacked the security fence. In one case, rioters attempted to throw an explosive device across the border, but it failed to clear the fence and landed inside Gaza, the military said.

Israeli troops responded with tear gas and, in some cases, live fire.

Palestinians climb the security fence along the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip, during clashes east of Gaza City, on February 15, 2019. (Said Khatib/AFP)

According to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, 20 people were injured in the clashes.

On Monday night, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip also rioted along the border with Israel, throwing dozens of explosive devices at the security fence and apparently sparking false reports of a mortar attack.

At least seven Palestinians were injured by Israeli gunfire in the Monday clashes, according to the Strip’s health ministry.

Monday’s nighttime clashes came a day after an IDF soldier was moderately injured in clashes along the northern Gaza border and two days after an attack lightly wounded a Border Police officer, the army said.

The IDF believes Hamas or the Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the second-largest terror group in Gaza, could attempt to draw Israel into a war by conducting an attack along the border — an anti-tank missile strike, an ambush from an undiscovered tunnel, or a similar psychologically significant attack.

IDF chief Lt. Gen. Aviv Kohavi, whose tenure began last month, ordered the military to update operational plans for fighting in the Gaza Strip.

Since last March, the Gaza border has seen large-scale weekly clashes on Fridays, smaller protests along the northern Gaza border on Tuesdays, and periodic flareups between the Israeli military and Palestinian terror organizations.

Times of Israel staff and AFP contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON (AFP) — US President Donald Trump said Wednesday he is barring a US-born former Islamic State propagandist from returning home, making the highly unusual case that she is not a US citizen.

Trump’s refusal to admit 24-year-old Hoda Muthana comes just as he is pressing Europeans to repatriate their own Islamic State fighters and will likely face legal challenges, with US citizenship extremely difficult to lose.

Trump said on Twitter he has “instructed” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “not to allow Hoda Muthana back into the country” — a break with usual US protocol not to comment on individuals’ immigration issues.

“Ms. Hoda Muthana is not a US citizen and will not be admitted into the United States,” Pompeo said in a terse statement.

“She does not have any legal basis, no valid US passport, no right to a passport, nor any visa to travel to the United States,” he added.

The US generally grants citizenship to everyone born on its soil and the Alabama-raised Muthana is believed to have traveled to Syria on a US passport.

But a US official said a later investigation showed that she had not been entitled to her passport, adding: “Ms. Muthana’s citizenship has not been revoked because she was never a citizen.”

Officials declined further comment but in a loophole that could boost the government case, Muthana’s father had been a diplomat from Yemen — and children of diplomats are not automatically given citizenship.

Muthana’s lawyer, Hassan Shilby, showed a birth certificate that demonstrated she was born in New Jersey in 1994 and said her father had ceased being a diplomat “months and months” before her birth.

Hassan Shibly, attorney for Hoda Muthana, the Alabama woman who left home to join the Islamic State group in Syria, speaks during a news conference Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2019, in Tampa, Fla. (AP Photo/Chris O’Meara)

“She is a US citizen. She had a valid passport. She may have broken the law and, if she has, she’s willing to pay the price,” Shilby told AFP at his office in Tampa.

He said Muthana wanted due process and was willing to go to prison if convicted.

“We cannot get to a point where we simply strip citizenship from those who break the law. That’s not what America is about. We have one of the greatest legal systems in the world, and we have to abide by it.”

US-born and radicalized

Just this weekend, Trump took to Twitter to chastise European allies that have not taken back hundreds of Islamic State prisoners caught in Syria, where Trump plans to withdraw US troops.

Comparatively few Americans have embraced radical Islam, with the Counter Extremism Project at George Washington University identifying 64 who went to join the Islamic State group in Syria or Iraq.

Muthana, raised in a strict household in Hoover, Alabama, said she was brainwashed by social media messages and headed to Syria without her parents’ knowledge in 2014.

Shortly afterward, Muthana posted on Twitter a picture of herself and three other women who appeared to torch their Western passports, including an American one.

She went on to post vivid calls on social media to kill Americans, glorifying the ruthless extremist group notorious for its beheadings that for a time ruled vast swathes of Syria and Iraq.

Screen capture from an Islamic State recruitment video directed at Western viewers. (YouTube)

But with the Islamic State group down to its last stretch of land, Muthana said she has renounced extremism and wants to return home with her toddler son, born to one of her three jihadist husbands.

“To say that I regret my past words, any pain that I caused my family and any concerns I would cause my country would be hard for me to really express properly,” she said in a handwritten note to her lawyer.

Tough to lose US citizenship

The US decision on Muthana comes amid rising debate in Europe on the nationality of extremists. Britain recently revoked the citizenship of Shamina Begum, who similarly traveled to Syria and wants to return to her country of birth.

Britain asserted that she was entitled to Bangladeshi citizenship due to her heritage, but the Dhaka government on Wednesday denied that she was eligible, leading her to become effectively stateless.

In this file photo taken on February 22, 2015, Renu Begum, eldest sister of British Islamic State member Shamima Begum, holds a picture of her sister while being interviewed by the media in central London. (Laura Lean/Pool/AFP)

US citizenship is significantly more difficult to lose. The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1868 after the Civil War as slavery was abolished, establishes that anyone born in the country is a citizen with full rights.

The US Supreme Court in the landmark 1967 Afroyim decision rejected the government’s attempt to revoke the nationality of a Polish-born naturalized American after he voted in Israel.

And last year a federal judge rejected a bid to strip the nationality of a Pakistani-born naturalized American who was convicted in a plot to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge.

But Trump has campaigned on a hard line over immigration and raised the prospect of ending birthright citizenship ahead of last year’s congressional elections.

In 2011, President Barack Obama ordered drone strikes that killed two Americans in Yemen — prominent Al-Qaeda preacher Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son — but did not believe it was possible to revoke citizenship.

PARIS — Anti-Semitism appears to have reached its worst levels since World War II, French President Emmanuel Macron told Jewish community leaders on Wednesday, a day after thousands of people took to the streets to denounce hate crimes.

The scourge has grown in recent years “and the situation has got worse in recent weeks,” Macron told the annual dinner of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF).

“Our country, and for that matter all of Europe and most Western democracies, seems to be facing a resurgence of anti-Semitism unseen since World War II,” he added.

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Europe’s biggest Jewish community is reeling after a string of attacks that have made global headlines.

Macron announced measures including legislation to fight hate speech on the internet, to be introduced by May.

Conseil Representatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF) president Francis Kalifat (R) welcomes French President Emmanuel Macron (C), flanked by his wife Brigitte Macron (L) as they arrive at the Louvre Carrousel to attend the 34th annual dinner of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France February 20, 2019, in Paris. (Photo by LUDOVIC MARIN / POOL / AFP)

He said he had asked his interior minister to take steps to ban racist or anti-Semitic groups, singling out “for a start” three far-right groups — Bastion Social, Blood and Honour Hexagone and Combat 18 — which he said “fuel hatred, promote discrimination or call for violence”.

He also vowed that France would recognize anti-Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism.

Macron earlier balked at a call by a lawmaker in his Republic on the Move party to criminalize anti-Zionist statements, which criticize the movement that established Israel as a home for Jews.

On a visit Tuesday to a cemetery in the Alsace region, near Germany, where 96 Jewish tombstones were daubed with swastikas, Macron promised: “We shall act, we shall pass laws, we shall punish.”

French President Emmanuel Macron looks at a grave vandalized with a swastika during a visit at the Jewish cemetery in Quatzenheim, on February 19, 2019, on the day of nationwide marches against a rise in anti-Semitic attacks. (Photo by Frederick FLORIN / POOL / AFP)

Also Tuesday, thousands of people, some carrying banners proclaiming “That’s enough”, held a rally in Paris to denounce anti-Semitism — one of around 70 protests staged nationwide.

Macron and his government have linked the appearance of swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti on artworks, shopfronts and headstones to far-right and far-left elements within the “yellow vest” protest movement.

A man wearing a yellow vest holds a placard reading “I am jew”, during a gathering at the Republique square to protest against anti-Semitism, in Paris, France, Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2019. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus

France is ours

A protester caught on video hurling abuse at Jewish writer and philosopher Alain Finkielkraut during a “yellow vest” demonstration in Paris last weekend was taken into custody Tuesday in the eastern city of Mulhouse, authorities said.

Police confirmed the suspect, who has been named in French media as telephone salesman Benjamin W., was the bearded man seen on video calling 69-year-old Finkielkraut a “dirty Zionist” and telling him “France is ours” after the philosopher ran into demonstrators on the street.

Police sources described the 36-year-old suspect as a small-time delinquent with ties to ultra-conservative Muslim groups.

He was one of the most vocal members of a group that jeered Finkielkraut and called him a “racist”, apparently referring to his past warnings about what he sees as the failure of Muslim immigrants to integrate into French society.

French Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut is targeted by yellow vest protesters shouting anti-Semitic slogans, Paris, February 16, 2019 (Screen grab via Yahoo)

The incident caused outrage both in France and abroad, with Israel’s Immigration Minister Yoav Gallant urging French Jews to “come home” to Israel for their safety.

President Reuven Rivlin voiced support for Macron and Finkielkraut, calling the anti-Semitic incidents an “affront” to France.

Earlier Wednesday, Rivlin spoke with Finkielkraut to express his solidarity over the “wicked and hurtful attack.”

“I heard that the demonstrators told you to go back to Tel Aviv. I am sure you know that Tel Aviv is a wonderful place but be in no doubt that every Jew, and every person, has the right to choose wherever they live”, said Rivlin, who also wrote to Macron to thank him for visiting the Jewish cemetery.

Also on Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke by telephone with Macron, the Israeli leader’s office said.

Focus on anti-Zionism

Several officials have accused radical “yellow vest” of fomenting a climate of hatred.

The anti-government protests began three months ago over fuel taxes but quickly grew into a broader anti-establishment, anti-capitalist rebellion, with some demonstrators using anti-Semitic slurs to denigrate Macron, a former Rothschild investment banker.

The number of anti-Jewish crimes rose 74 percent last year.

Anti-Semitism has a long history in France where society was deeply split at the end of the 19th century by the Alfred Dreyfus affair over a Jewish army captain wrongly convicted of treason.

During World War II, the French Vichy government collaborated with Germany notably in the deportation of Jews to death camps.

German Chancellor Adolf Hitler, right, shaking hands with Head of State of Vichy France Marshall Philippe Petain, in occupied France, October 24, 1940. (AP Photo)

Traditionally associated with the far right, anti-Semitism has become ingrained in the high-rise French housing estates that house many members of France’s Muslim community, Europe’s largest.

Jews have been targeted in several attacks by French jihadists in recent years.

But the proliferation of anti-Semitic graffiti is seen as a new trend.

In recent days, the word “Juden” was spray-painted on the window of a Paris bagel bakery and swastikas were daubed on postbox portraits of late French Holocaust survivor and women’s rights icon Simone Veil.