About 5 000 IS jihadists are now in Libya, the defence official said, approximately double earlier estimates, while the number of IS extremists in Iraq and Syria has dropped.
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The U.S. now estimates that the number of ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria has decreased to between 19,000 and 25,000 resulting from battlefield deaths and a reduced flow of foreign fighters into Syria.
In that regard, the claim of declining fighters might simply be untrue, with the 2016 estimate just the lower half of the over-broad 2014 estimate.
The official was not authorised to discuss the numbers publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Katherine Zimmerman, a terrorism expert at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington says that the “options for action in Libya are not that easy and not that obvious”. The disgusting reality is: “what is that something?”
But IS’s dwindling numbers in the Middle East may also reflect in part some North African militants heading to Libya rather than traveling to Syria to join the group as they did in previous years, officials found.
“The more that we can bolster the capacity of the national unity government to govern that country, the better off we will be”, he said.
By contemplating a return to some form of military action in Libya, the administration is acknowledging how little progress has been made in restoring security in a country with major oil resources.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest confirmed the latest tally for Iraq and Syria, based on a new intelligence assessment.
The one-day Rome meeting took place as talks have begun in Geneva to try to end the five-year-old Syrian civil war, which has killed at least 250,000 people, driven more than 10 million from their homes and drawn in the United States and Russian Federation on opposite sides. In recent months, US and British special-operations teams have increased clandestine reconnaissance missions in Libya to identify the leaders and map out their networks for possible strikes.
“It’s fair to say that we’re looking to take decisive military action against ISIL in conjunction with the political process”, said Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to The Times.
Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, said it’s hard to work with “moderate” militias, as illustrated in Syria, where a hodgepodge of armed groups are pursuing rival goals that don’t always align with America’s.
“I’m going to say, OK guys, let’s match up what is needed to win with what you have, and give everybody the opportunity to make an assignment for themselves”, he told reporters.
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“But I think he will quite likely use airpower – and perhaps the occasional commando raid – if there is reason to think that can contain or modestly weaken IS”.
