The White House signaled the U.S. is committed to keeping troops in Syria to fight Islamic State, a day after President Donald Trump said he wants to get out of the seven-year civil war “very soon” and “bring the troops back home.”

“The United States and our partners remain committed to eliminating the small ISIS presence in Syria that our forces have not already eradicated,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement today, referring to Islamic State terrorists. “We will continue to consult with our allies and friends regarding future plans.”

While Trump’s statement was in line with his calls during his presidential campaign to extract the U.S. from costly foreign wars, the latest comments appeared to take allies and some of his top military and counterterrorism aides by surprise. The White House said a call today with French President Emmanuel Macron focused partly on the two leaders’ “commitment to ensure the total defeat of ISIS,” although the word “Syria” wasn’t used in the U.S. readout of the conversation.

NO TIMETABLE

The White House statement said the military mission “to eradicate ISIS in Syria is coming to a rapid end,” but offered no timetable for U.S. withdrawal. It also didn’t suggest Trump has yielded in his opposition to staying in Syria to stabilize the country and counter the influence of Russia and Iran, allies of President Bashar al-Assad who has all but sealed victory in his war against rebel forces.

Army General Joseph Votel, the head of U.S. Central Command, made clear at a conference in Washington on Tuesday that he sees such a continuing role in Syria, which has become a global battlefield beset by troops and militias backed by countries with different agendas, as well as Islamic State and al-Qaeda. The conflict has killed more than 400,000 people and sent millions more fleeing.

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“I very much see us in that position right now,” Votel, who commands U.S. forces in the Mideast, said of stabilization efforts.

Brett McGurk, the administration’s special envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, said at the same conference that “our mission isn’t over, and we’re going to complete that mission.”

The Pentagon said in December that the U.S. had about 2,000 troops in Syria, with those numbers declining.

A complete U.S. withdrawal would be seen as a victory not just for Assad but for his allies. Russian President Vladimir Putin met his Turkish and Iranian counterparts in Ankara today for their latest summit on Syria’s future.

Debate over the U.S. role in Syria comes on the one-year anniversary this week of a chemical weapons attack against civilians on the town of Khan Sheikhoun. That decision prompted the first major military strike by Trump, when he ordered a cruise missile attack on a Syrian airbase in retaliation.

RUSSIA, IRAN

Intervention by Russia and Iran turned the tide of the long-running war in Assad’s favor. The Syrian leader scored a significant coup this week when rebels began to leave their last bastion near the capital, Damascus, after a heavy bombardment that added to the war’s half-million death toll.

Since September 20, 2014, when operations in Syria began, the U.S. has spent an average of $14.3 million a day on operations there and in neighboring Iraq, according to the Pentagon. Rebuilding Syria “could cost at least $100 billion and take at least 10 years to complete,” Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said in a statement to senators in March.

In his comments on Syria at a White House news conference on Tuesday, Trump made clear he wants others, such as Saudi Arabia, to pick up the costs of rebuilding Syria.

Trump said the U.S. has spent more than “$7 trillion in the Middle East over the last 17 years,” a figure he’s repeatedly cited without documentation. “We get nothing — nothing out of it. Nothing,” he said.