John Allen, a retired four-star Marine Corps general who has served as special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL since September 2014, plans to leave that job before the end of the year, according to a report by Bloomberg View.
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Administration officials, while refusing to publicly confirm Allen’s planned departure, praised him for creating and keeping intact the sometimes unwieldy coalition of 62 nations – including Western powers and Sunni Arab monarchies – to combat the extremists.
John Allen, who has held the position as the president’s ISIS Czar for a year, is leaving over frustrations with the current USA policy in the Middle East as well as his wife being ill with an auto-immune disease, sources said.
Initially nameless, the campaign was dubbed “Operation Inherent Resolve” in October 2014.
A group of U.S.-trained rebels that recently returned to Syria says it is investigating reports that one of its members has defected and handed over his weapons to the al-Qaida affiliate in the country. “I have sympathy for the hard task he was given because I do not believe the president’s team was fully on board and he was never empowered to bring the leadership necessary to achieve the mission”. Earlier this month, he told ABC News that there had been many successes in the war, and he focused on setbacks for the terror group in Tikrit, Iraq, and Kobane, Syria.
As time went on, Allen’s well-known support for expanding USA involvement exacerbated the friction, as top military leaders were reluctant to once more risk US lives on the ground in Iraq, especially given Iraqi forces’ failures over the previous year.
The 62-country coalition battling the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq is making progress, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. He agreed to stay on for another six at the request of Secretary of State John Kerry earlier this year.
In July, Allen said “ISIS is losing” the fight against the US-led coalition, even as other administration officials said Islamic State was the largest threat to the U.S. homeland.
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Interestingly, David Petraeus, the retired general who remains a popular figure in Congress despite a public fall from grace following revelations of an affair and a guilty plea of mishandling classified information, spent the morning discussing ISIS on the Hill. In the short term, his responsibilities are expected to be passed on to his deputy, Ambassador Brett McGurk. Until that changes, Allen’s replacement will face the same roadblocks that he did, and the war against the Islamic State will continue to flounder.
