A top United States commander has claimed the military campaigns in Iraq and Syria have cut the number of Daesh militants by 45,000, reducing the total number of the terrorist fighters to as few as 15,000.
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“We estimate that over the past 11 months, we’ve killed about 25 000 enemy fighters”.
Consequently, the number of combatants has been reduced to “15,000-30,000” in the two conflict areas, while ISIS is allegedly having problems recruiting new members.
But MacFarland said the coalition had made advances on the field over the past year, regaining control over ISIS strongholds like Ramadi and making advances elsewhere. We’ve shifted away from counterinsurgency toward 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. That’s almost half of what the enemy once controlled in Iraq and 20 percent of what they once controlled in Syria.
“We now talk about maintaining the momentum of the campaign in both Iraq and Syria”.
Despite the recent successes, the USA commander warned: “Military success in Iraq and Syria will not necessarily mean the end of Daesh”.
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. The group has held Mosul since June 2014 and has used it as a headquarters.
MacFarland was upbeat about the eventual recapture of Mosul in Iraq and Raqa in Syria, saying it would herald the “beginning of the end” of the campaign. The city, he said, is largely in the hands of the Syrian democratic forces and the pockets of enemy resistance are shrinking daily. He added that the US-backed local forces in both Iraq and Syria had been gaining ground and that the flow of foreign fighters there had decreased, adding that numerous ISIS fighters are now unwilling or untrained.
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And since then, the questions were answered by deeds rather than words, McFarland said, adding, In some ways, the progress against [ISIL] in Iraq and Syria has been remarkable.
