US President Donald Trump said that the United States would soon reduce the number of American troops in Afghanistan to four thousand.
"In a very short period of time, we will reduce the number of troops to eight thousand, then reduce it to four thousand. We are currently negotiating," Trump said in an interview with Axios.
He did not specify when the reduction of the military contingent would take place. "Very soon," Trump promised, declining to give a specific time frame.
When asked by a journalist what the number of troops in Afghanistan would be during the November US elections, Trump replied that it would be "probably from 4 to 5 thousand".
In late February, at a ceremony in Qatar, the United States and the radical Afghan Taliban movement signed the first peace agreement in more than 18 years of war, which provides for the withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan in 14 months and the beginning of an inter-Afghan dialogue after the completion of the prisoner exchange deal.
Earlier, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the US planned to fully withdraw troops from Afghanistan by May 2021.
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Photo: Patrick Semansky / AP / TASS
Based on materials from RIA Novosti