The scale of it surprised us a little bit”, said ISD Policy and Research Manager Henry Tuck, who co-authored “Shooting in the Right Direction: “Anti-ISIS Foreign Fighters in Syria & Iraq”.
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A no-bid $10 million contract announced in late July is possibly the first instance in which the Pentagon has publicly acknowledged using private military contractors alongside American special operations forces fighting Islamic State in Syria.
The experienced general said the future of the Islamist group was as an al-Qaeda style insurgency once its territory had been carved up in the Middle East.
Almost a month ago when US-backed forces seized a village in northern Syria from the clutches of Islamic State, a19-year-old girl swiftly tore off the niqab she had been forced to wear since 2014 and smiled. The first USA airstrikes struck ISIS in Iraq on August 8, 2014.
MacFarland later said the estimates of enemy killed and wounded were “squishy”, or hard to nail down precisely. “They have their ideology spread among children and they can carry weapons”, he added.
The US estimates Daesh has lost about 25,000 square kilometers of territory it previously held in Iraq and Syria. The first U.S. airstrikes struck IS in Iraq on 8 August 2014.
They were photographed near al-Tanf, where the United Kingdom is supporting the New Syrian Army (NSA) as it fights to push Isis back from strategic territory near the borders with Iraq and Jordan.
After three days of airstrikes, the ISIS advance on Irbil was slowed and Kurdish forces retook the base.
“Private U.S. citizens are strongly discouraged from traveling to Syria to take part in the conflict”, a State Department advisory warned earlier this year.
“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. “American combat troops will not be returning to fight in Iraq”.
MacFarland said on Wednesday that the coalition had trained more than 13,500 members of the Iraqi security forces including over 4,000 Iraqi Army soldiers, 1,500 counter terrorism service solders, 6,000 Peshmerga (Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq), nearly 1,000 Federal police and 300 border guards in how to combat the insurgency effectively. They killed more than 33,000 people, injured more than 41,000 and kidnapped more than 11,000 people.
For the past year, the US train-advise-and-assist mission has focused on conventional warfare skills, like “combined arms maneuver training, teaching the Iraqis how to integrate infantry, armor, artillery, engineers, aviation and other combat multipliers to achieve an overwhelming advantage at the right place and time on the battlefield”, MacFarland said.
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Britain built two training in camps in Jordan a year ago 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.
