A U.S. soldier sits on an armored vehicle on a newly installed position, near the tense front line between the U.S-backed Syrian Manbij Military Council and the Turkish-backed fighters, in Manbij, north Syria, Wednesday, April 4, 2018. A week ago, there was just a single house where U.S. soldiers had hoisted a U.S. flag on a hill a little ways back from a tense front line in Syria. Now on Wednesday stood a growing outpost with a perimeter of large sand barriers and barbed wire, a new watch tower and half a dozen armored vehicles, The Associated Press found. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
A U.S. soldier sits on an armored vehicle on a newly installed position, near the tense front line between the U.S-backed Syrian Manbij Military Council and the Turkish-backed fighters, in Manbij, north Syria, Wednesday, April 4, 2018. A week ago, there was just a single house where U.S. soldiers had hoisted a U.S. flag on a hill a little ways back from a tense front line in Syria. Now on Wednesday stood a growing outpost with a perimeter of large sand barriers and barbed wire, a new watch tower and half a dozen armored vehicles, The Associated Press found. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla) Credit: Hussein Malla

Washington — President Donald Trump has instructed military leaders to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria as soon as possible and told them he wants Arab allies to take over and pay for stabilizing and reconstructing areas liberated from the Islamic State, according to senior U.S. officials.

In a meeting with top national security aides on Tuesday, Trump backtracked on his public insistence that the troop exit was imminent, now that the militants were “close to 100 percent” defeated. Pressed by the president to tell him how much more time they needed to finish the job, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Joseph Dunford Jr. said it would probably be months, not years, officials said.

Trump agreed that the military, as they continued fighting against remaining militant pockets, could train local security forces.

But officials said he stressed that U.S. strategic goals in Syria do not include longer-term stability or reconstruction efforts. He said he did not want to be having the same conversation about withdrawal six months or more from now.

In the meantime, the administration is pressuring allies in the region to put what White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called “more skin in the game.”

Sanders, speaking at a White House briefing, said there was no firm departure date for the approximately 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria. Trump, she said, was “not going to put an arbitrary timeline. He is measuring it in actually winning the battle, not just putting some random number out there.”

“The goal, again, is to defeat ISIS,” she said, using an acronym for the Islamic State. “And when there’s no longer a need for troops to be there and we can transition to that local enforcement,” withdrawal “certainly would be the objective.”

Despite Trump’s recent public statements saying it was time for the United States to “get out” of Syria, military commanders were caught off guard by his sharp narrowing of the task before them and push for an early withdrawal, according to officials who would discuss the planning only on the condition of anonymity.

One official familiar with the conversations said that some participants had interpreted Trump’s remarks to mean he expected a withdrawal within six months.

But another said that Trump — who has frequently criticized President Barack Obama’s setting of a public deadline for the 2011 U.S. withdrawal from Iraq — “expressed frustration and impatience” while not setting a specific time limit.

The senior commanders told the president they had options prepared for a quick withdrawal if that was what he wanted. In the past, commanders have repeatedly stressed that a troop presence would be needed to prevent an Islamic State resurgence and increased territorial gains by Russian- and Iranian-backed Syrian forces, as well as to give the United States leverage in political efforts to resolve Syria’s civil war.

Asked in late November how long U.S. troops would stay, Mattis said that “we’re not just going to walk away” before a political settlement is reached between the Syrian government and opposition forces that have been fighting for the past seven years.