“You don’t hear the world “stalemate” anymore” to describe the anti-ISIS campaign, Army Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, the commander of Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve, said in a briefing from his Baghdad headquarters to the Pentagon.
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The newspaper says the NSA’s most significant operation occurred in June this year when the group launched an attack on Al-Bukamal, a town on the Iraqi border that has always been a crossing point for foreign jihadists during the U.S. occupation, and which is now being held by IS.
The US-led military effort against Daesh started exactly two years ago, aimed at halting the militants as they swept across Iraq and Syria. The daily cost for such operations is about $11.9 million-around $8 billion so far.
Arab and Kurdish fighters have expelled Islamic State group jihadists from Manbij in Aleppo province, bringing an end to a long ordeal for those who remained in the city during weeks of fierce fighting.
MacFarland later said the estimates of enemy killed and wounded were “squishy”, or hard to nail down precisely.
The report notes that, “ex-military veteran fighters are also motivated by a desire to “finish the job” and ensure previous sacrifices were not in vain”.
Officials also estimate IS has lost 25,000 square kilometers (9,650 square miles) of the territory it once held in its self-declared “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria, or about 50 percent and 20 percent respectively in each country.
“If it weren’t for the strikes and the heavy artillery (given to the Iraqi army by the coalition), we would still be up in the mountains”, Peshmerga solider Ayoub Khaylani said.
Britain built two training in camps in Jordan past year and in February held a major “mission rehearsal” called exercise Channel Storm in which more than 1,600 troops from 3 UK Division took part in wargames.
When President Barack Obama launched airstrikes in Iraq in August 2014, officials stressed USA involvement would not be sustained for the long term. After training has finished, NSA fighters will return to battle IS (Daesh) alongside SAS forces, according to the Sun.
The video was taken in the Syrian city of Manbij, which was liberated by US -backed forces on Saturday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
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Operating often behind the fluid enemy lines in North Africa and later Italy, those irregular British commandos looked more like land pirates in a Mad Max film than soldiers- but they were the last thing that many enemy troops ever saw. The Pentagon said there were about 3,800 US forces in Iraq, not including hundreds on temporary duty and not included in the official count. Nobody knows. It might be a year, two years, a day, a couple of days.
