A top USA military commander said that the militant group that calls itself Islamic State is on the retreat “on all fronts” as the number of its combatants at its disposal declines. But he added that the USA still has quite a bit of work to do at the Qayyarah Air Base in northern Iraq before it can be used as a hub for the battle to retake Mosul. “When you add that to the 20,000 estimated killed prior to our arrival, that’s 45,000 enemies taken off the battlefield”, Army Lt.
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The US military and its foreign allies have waged a war to drive out the Islamist terrorist group from both Iraq and Syria.
In July, the U.S. announced it was sending over 500 additional USA troops to Iraq to assist the country’s armed forces in the offensive against the Islamic State.
Reporters are coming up empty handed in their attempts to obtain precise figures as to how many US troops are on the ground in Iraq and Syria.
MacFarland said he’s seen estimates of between 15,000 to 30,000 ISIS fighters remaining, but declined to give a more specific number. “We have plans to train quite a number of the additional forces for that mission”, MacFarland said.
He told reporters that the recent progress against Daesh in Iraq and Syria has been “remarkable”, with the enemy now “in retreat on all fronts”. “In other words, we spend more time thinking about what we will do to the enemy than we spend thinking about what the enemy might do to us”.
“A joint operation was conducted by our Directorate General of Counter Terrorism and US Special Forces in the vicinity of Al-Qaim near the Iraqi-Syrian border”, the Kurdish Regional Security Council said in a statement.
Despite the recent successes, the United States commander warned: “Military success in Iraq and Syria will not necessarily mean the end of Daesh”. “They made us wear it against our will so I removed it that way to spite them”. “They have an effective air force, but of course it’s concerning because with so many members of the leadership gone, it’s going to take them time to grow new leaders and replace, so it remains to be seen what happens next”.
MacFarland cautioned that while there have been successes in both countries, IS will continue to be a threat.
The first USA airstrikes struck ISIS in Iraq on August 8, 2014, followed by targets in Syria, then Afghanistan and then Libya.
The U.S. troops will include engineers, logistics personnel, security and communications forces. “We have killed many Daesh commanders and soldiers, destroyed key infrastructure capabilities, logistical nodes, and Daesh fighters are retreating south into the mountains of southern Nangarhar as we speak”, Nicholson said. The city is Iraq’s second largest, with about a million residents, and has been an ISIS stronghold since June 2014.
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Experts do foresee the eventual collapse of IS, but the jihadists are fighting back by calling on followers to launch attacks across the globe and are likely to persist for years as a terrorist organization.
