Saudi Crown Prince wants U.S. pressure on Iran maintained to avert war

During his trip to the U.S., the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said he wants the U.S. military to maintain a presence in Syria.

Despite President Donald Trump’s declaration that American forces will be pulled from the war-torn country in the near future, he insisted they should not do so.

“We believe American troops should stay for at least the mid-term, if not the long-term,” he told TIME Thursday in a wide-ranging interview.

Iran, through proxy militias and regional allies, will establish a overland supply route that leads from Beirut through Syria and Iraq to Tehran, Bin Salman said. The so-called “Shiite Crescent” would give Iran a greater foothold in a tumultuous region through a string of allies.

The U.S. maintains a remote base at Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria, in the middle of that corridor. It’s there that Special Operations forces coordinate with Syrian opposition fighters to wipe out the remaining ISIS fighters holed up in a series of towns along the Euphrates River and a stretch of desert straddling the Iraq-Syria border, said Time.