It's a "tough call" whether to deploy U.S. troops in eastern Syria to protect oil fields from being seized by ISIS militants, but someone must protect them, Rep. Ted Yoho said Friday.
"The reason we're doing that is to prevent that oil going back to ISIS," the Florida Republican told Fox News' "America's Newsroom," pointing out that the money from the oil fields had funded ISIS "when they did all those terrible things the beheading and all that."
"That has to be protected until there is some semblance of normalcy, if that ever can be accomplished in that area," said Yoho. "Until Syria can get ahold of that, somebody has to protect that so ISIS doesn't."
The Syria situation is a "hodgepodge" of competing interests, said Yoho, and he'd prefer the United States "to get out of there 100%."
"We went in there to get rid of ISIS," said Yoho. "We've decimated them. They aren't gone. It is an ideology (and) I don't know if you'll ever get rid of that radical jihadist Islamic notion. It's like getting rid of Communism. It will probably always be here and we need to learn how to deal with it so it doesn't come on our shores in America. Let Russia own that and stay in the Middle East. I'm all for bringing our troops home. It has to be done in the right way."
Meanwhile, 500,000 to 600,000 already have been killed in Syria's civil war, and the number of refugees that have been displaced around the world has destabilized the European Union and other parts of the world," said Yoho.
"This has to come to an end, but America being in there I don't know what purpose we have other than when we went in there under President (Barack) Obama," said Yoho. "We need to at the genesis of why we're in Syria. It was to defeat ISIS or to go after ISIS. Well, where did ISIS come from? ISIS came from President Obama pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, pulling our troops out so it gave a foothold for ISIS."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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