WASHINGTON (AP) — Targeting Turkey’s economy, President Donald Trump announced sanctions Monday aimed at restraining the Turks’ assault against Kurdish fighters and civilians in Syria — an assault Turkey began after Trump announced he was moving U.S. troops out of the way.

The United States also called on Turkey to stop the invasion, and Trump is sending Vice President Mike Pence to the region in an attempt to begin negotiations. Pence said Trump spoke directly to Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“President Trump communicated to him very clearly that the United States of American wants Turkey to stop the invasion, implement an immediate ceasefire and to begin to negotiate with Kurdish forces in Syria to bring an end to the violence,” Pence said.

The Americans were scrambling for Syria’s exits, a move criticized at home and abroad as opening the door to a resurgence of the Islamic State group whose violent takeover of Syrian and Iraq lands five years ago was the reason American forces came in the first place.

Trump said the approximately 1,000 U.S. troops who had been partnering with local Kurdish fighters to battle IS in northern Syria are leaving the country. They will remain in the Middle East, he said, to “monitor the situation” and to prevent a revival of IS — a goal that even Trump’s allies say has become much harder as a result of the U.S. pullout.

The Turks began attacks in Syria last week against the Syrian Kurdish fighters, whom the Turks see as terrorists. On Monday, Syrian government troops moved north toward the border region, setting up a potential clash with Turkish-led forces.

Trump said Turkey’s invasion is “precipitating a humanitarian crisis and setting conditions for possible war crimes,” a reference to reports of Turkish-backed fighters executing Kurdish fighters on the battlefield.

The Kurdish forces previously allied with the U.S. said they had reached a deal with President Bashar Assad’s government to help them fend off Turkey’s invasion, a move that brings Russian forces deeper into the conflict.

In his sanctions announcement, Trump said he was halting trade negotiations with Turkey and raising steel tariffs. He said he would soon sign an order permitting sanctions to be imposed on current and former Turkish officials.

“I am fully prepared to swiftly destroy Turkey’s economy if Turkish leaders continue down this dangerous and destructive path,” Trump said.

American troops consolidated their positions in northern Syria on Monday and prepared to evacuate equipment in advance of a full withdrawal, a U.S. defense official said.

The official, who was not authorized to be quoted by name, said U.S. officials were weighing options for a potential future counter-IS campaign, including the possibility of waging it with a combination of air power and special operations forces based outside of Syria, perhaps in Iraq.

The hurried preparations for a U.S. exit were triggered by Trump’s decision Saturday to expand a limited troop pullout into a complete withdrawal.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Monday he would travel to NATO headquarters in Brussels next week to urge European allies to impose “diplomatic and economic measures” against Turkey — a fellow NATO ally — for what Esper called Ankara’s “egregious” actions.

Esper said Turkey’s incursion had created unacceptable risk to U.S. forces in northern Syria and “we also are at risk of being engulfed in a broader conflict.”

The only exception to the U.S. withdrawal from Syria is a group of perhaps 200 troops who will remain at a base called Tanf in southern Syria near the Jordanian border along the strategically important Baghdad-to-Damascus highway. Those troops work with Syrian opposition forces unrelated to the Kurdish-led fighters in northern Syria.

Esper said the U.S. withdrawal would be done carefully to protect the troops and to ensure that no U.S. equipment was left behind. He declined to say how long that might take.

In a series of tweets Monday, Trump defended his gamble that pulling U.S. forces out of Syria would not weaken U.S. security and credibility. He took sarcastic swipes at critics who say his Syria withdrawal amounts to a betrayal of the Kurds and plays into the hands of Russia.

“Anyone who wants to assist Syria in protecting the Kurds is good with me, whether it is Russia, China, or Napoleon Bonaparte,” he wrote. “I hope they all do great, we are 7,000 miles away!”

Trump has dug in on his decision to pull out the troops, believing it fulfills a key campaign promise and will be a winning issue in the 2020 election, according to White House officials.

This has effectively ended a five-year effort to partner with Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighters to ensure a lasting defeat of the Islamic State group. Hundreds of IS supporters escaped a holding camp amid clashes between invading Turkish-led forces and Kurdish fighters, and analysts said an IS resurgence seemed more likely, just months after Trump declared the extremists defeated.

Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, normally a staunch Trump supporter, said he was “gravely concerned” by events in Syria and Trump’s response so far.

Withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria “would re-create the very conditions that we have worked hard to destroy and invite the resurgence of ISIS,” he said in a statement. “And such a withdrawal would also create a broader power vacuum in Syria that will be exploited by Iran and Russia, a catastrophic outcome for the United States’ strategic interests.”

However, Trump got quick support from Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who had lambasted his withdrawal decision last week as “shortsighted,” ″irresponsible” and “unnerving to its core.” On Monday, echoing Trump, Graham said on Fox News Channel that the current situation was Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s fault and Turkey would face “crippling sanctions” from the U.S. on its economy.

Pence said the sanctions announced Monday were only the beginning “unless Turkey is willing to embrace a ceasefire, come to the negotiating table and end the violence.”

The Kurds have turned to the Syrian government and Russia for military assistance, further complicating the battlefield.

The prospect of enhancing the Syrian government’s position on the battlefield and inviting Russia to get more directly involved is seen by Trump’s critics as a major mistake. But he tweeted that it shouldn’t matter.

“Others may want to come in and fight for one side or the other,” he wrote. “Let them!”

New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Trump is weakening America. ’To be clear, this administration’s chaotic and haphazard approach to policy by tweet is endangering the lives of U.S. troops and civilians,” Menendez said in a statement.

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AP writer Jonathan Lemire contributed to this story.

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Mainstream media wonders why conservatives call them “fake news.” It doesn’t take the President pointing it out anymore for us to see their dishonest ways. ABC News is the latest propaganda machine attacking the President, this time trying to manipulate the public by using 2016 gun range footage as an example of Turkey’s military bombing civilians in eastern Syria.

The President has been criticized from people on the right and left when the White House announced last week America would be pulling troops back from the Syrian-Turkish border. This move allowed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to conduct the invasion he’s long sought into eastern Syria to attack the Kurdish forces he believes are assisting Kurdish terrorists in his country. He also intends to establish a “safe zone” 20-miles into Syrian territory along a 300-mile stretch where he can return nearly two million Syrian refugees who have been living in Turkey since the Syrian civil war.

Reports of attacks by the Turkish military as well as their Syrian opposition force proxies on Kurdish cities and villages have prompted the President and many in Congress to work on harsh sanctions against the Middle Eastern nation. But media reports continue to paint the picture in a much worse light than it really is.

Here’s the original video from 2016:

Now, let’s take a look at the report from ABC News:

Wow! ABC News is trying to pass gun range videos as combat footage from Syria pic.twitter.com/zfTWtwwSfZ

— Wojciech Pawelczyk 🇵🇱🇺🇸 (@PolishPatriotTM) October 14, 2019

Here’s the full ABC News report, if you can stomach the lies:

As you can see, it’s the same video, edited to make it less obvious that it’s a show put on with an audience watching in the foreground. This despicable false news report has one purpose: To rally opposition to President Trump. The worst part is they can issue a retraction or correction sometime later, but that retraction will only be seen by a small percentage of people who watched the original report. There will be countless people today walking around believing the alleged slaughter they saw today was a video from within Syria.

It’s no wonder the President has called the media his biggest obstacle to winning reelection.

If ABC News made a mistake, then their incompetence is startling. If they did it on purpose (and with the edits to the video, that seems to be the case), then they’re an outright evil group of bald-faced liars pretending to report the news.

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It’s another case of leftist media taking nothing and turning into a major news story bashing President Trump. At the very least, the NY Times reporters were lying about the facts surrounding the story. At worst, this seems like it could be a blatant setup. Either way, it’s working as the President is being blamed left and right for a violent spoof video played in a back room at AMP Fest 2019.

The three-day event in Miami was tainted by a report from the NY Times that a parody video depicted President Trump violently killing Democrats and progressive news outlets. It’s an edit of the infamous “church massacre” in the movie Kingsman: The Secret Service starring Colin Firth and and Taron Egerton. President Trump’s head replaces Firth’s as the protagonist goes on a murderous rampage, along with everyone else in the “church,” shooting, stabbing, and killing each other. The other churchgoers’ heads are replaced by logos for various progressive news outlets as well as Democratic politicians, plus Mitt Romney who fittingly stab President Trump in the back.

The NY Times article, which I won’t link to for the sake of journalistic integrity, insinuates that it was a major part of the event that included such prominent Trump supporters as Donald Trump Jr., his former spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. They even quoted a spokesperson at the event saying the video was being looked into.

But a statement by the event on Twitter seems to contradict the NY Times report and put it into a more dubious light:

#AMPFest19 official statement on unauthorized video. pic.twitter.com/w6zzhZ4Lje

— American Priority Conference (@AmericanP2019) October 14, 2019

The statement reads:

It has come to our attention that an unauthorized video was shown in a side room at #AMPFest19. This video was not approved, seen, or sanctioned by the AMPFest19 organizers. The organizers of #AMPFest19 were not even aware of the video until they were contacted by the NYT. The first time anyone officially associated with #AMPFest19 was made aware of the video was when the NYT requested comment. We find it shocking that the New York Times would not report on any of the sanctioned events in the article. Including our panel conversation LITERALLY condemning political violence while claiming to be upset over a meme that was not sanctioned shown on stage, or approved. #AMPFest19 always has and always will condemn political violence. And proof of this was our major panel discussion on this very topic at AMPFest19.

The video was shown in a side room. It was unapproved. None of the big names mentioned in the article even saw the video on the small screen where it was played. The event itself, which is relatively new and not as widely attended as events like CPAC, focused on important political issues, including stopping political violence. Anyone reading the NY Times article would know none of this based on their reporting.

Think of the tens of people who may have been radicalized by this

— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) October 14, 2019

In a sad irony, the violence being “condemned” would have been seen by literally dozens of people at best had the anti-Trump news outlet not made the story go viral.

Conservatives on Twitter pointed out the hypocrisy of the NY Times reporting:

If we’re talking about “violence in videos” here is real violence at a rally in Minneapolis, where real people are physically attacked for their political views. Not edited memes and fictional characters from “Kingsman” https://t.co/rK8t4DCnub

— Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) October 14, 2019

The same media who lost their minds over the Joker movie is now losing their minds over memes https://t.co/fcLqJBO0FR

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) October 14, 2019

Bigger question – if they truly cared about political violence, why weren’t they upset about the original movie when the victims were all conservative Christians? @JackPosobiec @willchamberlain https://t.co/zCrgasBNUk

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) October 14, 2019

This is it? This is what everybody's freaking out about? It's that scene from KINGSMAN with some crappy video editing on top of it. I think the republic will survive it. https://t.co/sbDBJIcG5k

— Huell Babineaux did nothing wrong (@jtLOL) October 14, 2019

The real reason that the Media is upset about the Kingsman video is that it shows them in a church.

Devastating to their brand.

— Carpe Donktum🔹 (@CarpeDonktum) October 14, 2019

.@brianstelter in his newsletter links the Trump Kingsman video to the church shooting in New Hampshire which has no proven political motive and happened before The NY Times story ran. Him and his network and his boss all know they need Trump for ratings, and he plays the part. pic.twitter.com/u8gD0bzjVs

— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) October 14, 2019

A meme video will get someone killed apparently. Sure. https://t.co/sqFOitUvaV

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) October 14, 2019

Here’s the graphic video for anyone interested. Just to reiterate, it’s graphic. Last warning: Graphic content.

It is clear based on AMP’s statement that this was a setup designed to attach a silly, albeit horrible video to the Trump campaign. Sadly, nobody even saw the video until the NY Times made it go viral. Who incites violence? Leftwing media.

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