Article snippet: President State Department. "By the way, we're knocking the hell out of Rex Tillerson have said repeatedly that those troops will remain and the civilian presence will increase as the U.S. works to prevent a new terror group from forming. But Trump's suggestion then that the U.S. could leave "very soon" seemed to catch spokespeople at the Pentagon and State Department off guard. A Pentagon spokesperson referred questions about the president's comment to the White House. State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert said she was unaware of any new policy to withdraw U.S. forces. A spokesperson for the White House National Security Council did not respond to a request to comment. The comment also contradicts how the president himself has spoken about American military action – as he has repeatedly insisted the U.S. not set timelines or telegraph actions to the enemy. “America's enemies must never know our plans, or believe they can wait us out," Trump said at Fort Myer, Va., in August while announcing a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan. Mattis has made the same argument, writing in a letter to Congress in January, "We do not have a timeline-based approach to our presence in either Iraq or Syria." Withdrawing "prematurely," he added, would only give ISIS the opportunity "to regenerate capabilities and reestablish local control of territory... We, along with the Coalition and our partners, remain committed to ISIS's permanent defeat." While th... Link to the full article to read more