Fact-Checking Trump on Syria, Erdogan and the Kurds

But that figure is hardly representative of overall troop levels in Syria. Mr. Trump plans to withdraw 1,000 troops from Syria. A separate group of 150 troops in southern Syria will stay there.

What Mr. Trump Said

“We were supposed to be there for 30 days, we stayed for 10 years.”

The Syrian conflict broke out in 2011, but there was no major United States involvement until 2014 and no American ground troops in the area until 2015 — a period of four to five years, not a decade. Furthermore, there were no timetables established, much less a commitment to limit the military engagement to 30 days.

When former President Barack Obama announced the start of airstrikes against Islamic State targets in 2014, he did not define a timeline but instead said “the overall effort will take time.”

A year later, when the Obama administration announced the deployment of fewer than 50 special operations forces on the ground in Syria, Josh Earnest, a press secretary for Mr. Obama, also declined to give a specific date for withdrawal.

“This is not a short-term proposition in terms of our counter-ISIL strategy,” Mr. Earnest said in October 2015, using another acronym for the Islamic State.

Brett H. McGurk, a former special presidential envoy for the coalition to defeat ISIS, refuted Mr. Trump’s 30-day timeline last week in a tweet: “None of this is true.”

What Mr. Trump Said

Reporter: “What’s your bottom line with Turkey? Are you O.K. with Erdogan saying he’s not going to do a cease-fire?”

Mr. Trump: “He didn’t say that at all.”

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey did, in fact, rule out a cease-fire.

“They say ‘declare a cease-fire’. We will never declare a cease-fire,” Mr. Erdogan said in a news conference Tuesday, according to Reuters.

Other Claims

Mr. Trump also repeated a number of other claims The Times has previously fact-checked:

  • He suggested the Democratic National Committee server hacked in the 2016 election was missing and repeated the conspiracy theory that the owner of American company that examined it “is from Ukraine.” (The server is on display at the D.N.C.’s headquarters and the owner is an American citizen born in Russia.)

  • He wrongly claimed the United States “never won” a trade case before the World Trade Organization before he took office. (It has won 85.7 percent of the cases it has initiated before the W.T.O. since 1995.)

  • He again misstated how the North Atlantic Treaty Organization works when he said many members “aren’t paying their dues.” (Members do not pay NATO, but rather commit to spending 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense.)

  • He exaggerated when he said the trade deficit between the United States and the European Union was $150 billion. (It’s $115 billion.)

  • He claimed that “I lost maybe 2 million votes, maybe more, because of Facebook.” (He was likely referring to a disputed estimate about the impact of Google’s search results on the 2016 elections.)

Curious about the accuracy of a claim? Email factcheck@nytimes.com.



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