US President Joe Biden monitoring ‘extraordinary events’ in Syria: White House

US President Joe Biden is keeping a close eye on “extraordinary events” transpiring in Syria, the White House said late Saturday, after a war monitor said President Bashar Assad fled the country and rebels declared they have taken the capital.

“President Biden and his team are closely monitoring the extraordinary events in Syria and staying in constant touch with regional partners,” National Security Council spokesman Sean Savett said in a statement on social media.

President-elect Donald Trump earlier said Saturday that the US military should stay out of the escalating conflict in Syria as a shock opposition offensive closes in on the capital, declaring in a social media post, “THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT.”

With world leaders watching the rapid militant advance against Syria’s Russian- and Iranian-backed president, Bashar Assad, Biden’s national security adviser separately stressed that the Biden administration had no intention of intervening.

“The United States is not going to … militarily dive into the middle of a Syrian civil war,” Jake Sullivan told an audience in California.

He said the US would keep acting as necessary to keep the Daesh — a violently anti-Western extremist group not known to be involved in the offensive but with sleeper cells in Syria’s deserts — from exploiting openings presented by the fighting.

Insurgents’ stunning march across Syria sped faster Saturday, reaching the gates of Damascus and government forces abandoning the central city of Homs. The government was forced to deny rumors that Assad had fled the country.

Trump’s comments on the dramatic militant push were his first since Syrian militants launched their advance late last month. They came while he was in Paris for the reopening of the Notre Dame cathedral.

In his post, Trump said Assad did not deserve US support to stay in power.

Assad’s government has been propped up by the Russian and Iranian military, along with Hezbollah and other Iranian-allied militias, in a now 13-year-old war against opposition groups seeking his overthrow. The war, which began as a mostly peaceful uprising in 2011 against the Assad family’s rule, has killed a half-million people, fractured Syria and drawn in a more than a half-dozen foreign militaries and militias.

The insurgents are led by Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, which the US has designated as a terrorist group and says has links to Al-Qaeda, although the group has since broken ties with Al-Qaeda.

The insurgents have met little resistance so far from the Syrian army, the Russian and Iranian militaries or allied militias in the country.

The Biden administration says Syrian opposition forces’ capture of government-held cities demonstrates just how diminished those countries are by wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon.

“Assad’s backers — Iran, Russia and Hezbollah — have all been weakened and distracted,” Sullivan said Saturday at an annual gathering of national security officials, defense companies and lawmakers at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley.

“None of them are prepared to provide the kind of support to Assad that they provided in the past,” he later added.

The US has about 900 troops in Syria, including US forces working with Kurdish allies in the opposition-held northeast to prevent any resurgence of the Daesh group.

Gen. Bryan Fenton, head of US Special Operations Command, said he would not want to speculate on how the upheaval in Syria would affect the US military’s footprint in the country. “It’s still too early to tell,” he said.

What would not change is the focus on disrupting Daesh operations in Syria and protecting US troops, Fenton said during a panel at the Reagan event.