He was speaking to reporters during his final Pentagon press briefing via Skype from Baghdad, Iraq, MacFarland shared his counter-IS campaign observations from the past eleven months while he was commander of the Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR), the joint task force established by the worldwide coalition against the terror group.
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MacFarland will be replaced later this month by Army Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, commander of XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
As reported by Fox News, MacFarland said civilians and Islamic State administration officials have been forced into front-line combat jobs including manning checkpoints, making them a less capable and “diminished” force. The SDF already has killed more than 2,000 ISIS fighters there, he said. “We modified the type and level of support we provided over the course of the past year, but we have not fundamentally altered the paradigm of train and equip, advise and assist”.
Lt. -Gen. MacFarland was upbeat about the eventual recapture of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, saying it would herald the “beginning of the end” of the campaign.
“The few people of us who were watching this group develop from 2010 to 2014 knew very well that this was going to be a very long-term battle, and the idea that no USA troops were going to be involved was just a fantasy”, Lister told AFP.
In a separate report, The International Business Times note that more than 33,000 people have died at the hands of the Islamic State group and other organisations loyal to it between 2002 and 2015. MacFarland said Iraqi regular troops, counterterrorism forces, and police require still more training – both for the assault and to maintain security afterwards – while Americans set up additional logistics preparations at the nearby Qayyarah airfield.
In Syria, commanders have cited progress that US -backed fighters have made in pushing militants from Manbij, a key Islamic State stronghold, though those forces are still 70 miles from Raqqa.
The losses have resulted in Daesh’s forces being reduced to between 15,000 and 30,000 fighters, MacFarland said. “While the forces on the Mara line have indeed held against [ISIL] advances, they’ve even made some progress south of the Turkish border”.
“The (coalition) team is focused on force generation to try and make that simultaneous operation occur, because we would see huge benefits from it”, Harrigian said, referring to building Iraqi and Syrian ground forces. “And soon [the SDF] will finish the fight in the important city of Manbij”, he said.
U.S. -backed opposition forces in Manbij, Syria have claimed to be in control of 90 per cent of the city. The findings underscore everything we know about the Islamic State’ brutal methods and harsh governance in the areas of Syria and Iraq it controls. “Our artillery has conducted more than 700 fire missions”.
He said if the 25,000 killed under his watch are added to the 20,000 DAESH fighters who were killed prior to his arrival, then the total number of fighters taken off the battlefield reaches 45,000.
Speaking at a briefing, General Sergei Rudskoi, a senior Russian Defence Ministry official, said the pause in fighting would take place from 10 in the morning to one in the afternoon local time.
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Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland, the outgoing commander of the US-led coalition fighting DAESH in Iraq and Syria, told a Pentagon press briefing that the number of the terror group’s combatants had fallen as a result of global military efforts against the group.
