President Donald Trump dismissed concerns that the U.S. withdrawal from Syria has left American-allied Kurds abandoned and allowed Russia to fill the void, Bloomberg reports.
“Syria may have some help with Russia and that’s fine,” Trump said. “It’s a lot of sand. They’ve got a lot of sand over there, so there’s a lot of sand they can play with.”
Trump suggested that Russian involvement in the region would eventually prove costly, drawing parallels with the Soviet-Afghan war in the 1980s.
“It used to be called the Soviet Union, now it’s called Russia for a reason - because they lost so much money in Afghanistan they had to downsize,” Trump said. “So if Russia wants to get involved with Syria that’s really up to them. They have a problem with Turkey, they have a problem with the border. It’s not our border, we shouldn’t be losing lives over it.”
