Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, called the pullout "catastrophic," and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., deemed it a "disaster in the making." “We brought them there to crush ISIS. Syria is one of the pivotal countries in the Middle East. Trump said seeing footage of the victims on television had affected him, and he described the attack as crossing “many lines” for him, “beyond a red line.”The White House announced that the U.S. was taking military action against Assad’s regime in the form of airstrikes.Some lawmakers, including some Republicans, called on Trump to seek congressional approval for the use of force. The ban, which the Trump administration asserted was necessary for the nation’s security, was quickly halted by the courts after critics said it discriminated against Muslims.A second version of the travel ban, which is working its way through the courts, would not ban Syrian refugees indefinitely.Dozens of people, including children, died in a chemical attack in Syria that the United States and others say was carried out by Assad’s regime. | GettyPresident Donald Trump ordered military strikes against Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime on Thursday, a decision that follows years of U.S. leaders weighing how to respond to a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced many more.Here is a look at how the United States has dealt with the violence in Syria since the 2011 start of the civil war, one of several uprisings in a series of Middle East protests known as the Arab Spring. Obama Not yet working in government, Donald Trump took to Twitter to urge Obama to warn against involving the United States in the conflict.The proposal to take military action met with skepticism from some members of both parties in Congress, especially the House, which was controlled by Republicans.In early September, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Instead, the United States and Russia, an ally of Assad’s regime, The watchdog Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons But OPCW Director-General Ahmet Uzumcu cautioned that “we cannot say for sure it has no more chemical weapons.”Later in the year, Obama asked lawmakers to approve his plan for the United States to arm and train rebels in Syria to fight the Islamic State in the region. The United States supports the UN-facilitated, Syrian-led process mandated by UNSCR 2254. The decision to intervene in Syria in 2015 resulted from an extraordinary confluence of political drivers and military-enabling factors. In late 2015 the first American ground troops entered Syria — initially 50, growing to the current official total of about 2,000. The White House announced that the U.S. was taking military action against Assad’s regime in … ","mediaType":"default","section":"ABCNews/International","id":"59959668","title":"What you need to know about US military involvement in Syria","url":"/International/video/us-military-involvement-syria-59959668"} This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google December 19, 2018 . The US had other reasons to play a role in the Syrian crisis.

The first U.S. troops arrived in Syria under the Obama administration in October 2015 to push back ISIS.
In response to the chemical weapons attack, the Obama administration signaled that the president was considering “limited” military intervention in Syria. President Donald Trump said his administration had The Pentagon said in a prepared statement that IS-held territory had been "liberated," but added that the U.S. would continue "working with our partners and allies to defeat ISIS wherever it operates."