The caliphate is gone. The terrorists aren’t.
President Donald Trump has just declared that ISIS’s so-called caliphate in Syria and Iraq is “100 percent” defeated, touting it as one of his administration’s biggest foreign policy successes and one his predecessor wasn’t able to achieve.
The problem is that top US officials say there are still thousands of ISIS fighters active in those countries despite their loss of territory. In other words, the caliphate is defeated — but not the terrorists.
Speaking to US troops at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska, where Air Force One briefly stopped to refuel on its way back from Vietnam, Trump boasted: “You kept hearing it was 90 percent, 92 percent, the caliphate in Syria. Now’s it’s 100 percent. ... We did that in a much shorter period of time than it was supposed to be.”
That ISIS has lost all of its territory is certainly a major accomplishment, since in 2014 it controlled an area of land the size of Britain. But “losing territory does not mean a group is defeated,” says Shanna Kirschner, an expert on Syria at Allegheny College who spoke to me in early February.
Trump’s own government agrees.
Earlier this month, Gen. Joseph Votel, who leads US troops in the Middle East, told CNN that ISIS will still have the ability to terrorize. The group “still has leaders, still has fighters, it still has facilitators, it still has resources,” he said. “So our continued military pressure is necessary to continue to go after that network.”
Trump’s State Department has made similar statements. “Despite the liberation of ISIS-held territory in Iraq and Syria, ISIS remains a significant terrorist threat,” deputy spokesperson Robert Palladino said in a press release on February 4.
According to reports by both the Pentagon and the US intelligence community, ISIS still has thousands of fighters spread across Syria and Iraq. One estimate from last August found that ISIS had as many as 17,100 fighters in Syria, and about 30,000 total between the two countries.
With that many fighters still active, the group can continue to wreak havoc in the region. In January, it bombed a restaurant in Manbij, Syria, killing at least 15 people, including four Americans: two troops, a Pentagon civilian, and a military contractor.
What’s worse, experts warn that the withdrawal of America’s 2,000 troops from Syria will make it easier for ISIS to regain territory, according to the Pentagon.
In that same CNN interview earlier this month, Votel said he wasn’t consulted on the Syria withdrawal decision, saying that if he had been, a withdrawal “would not have been my military advice at that particular time.
“We want [ISIS] to be able to be controlled or addressed by the indigenous partners,” Votel continued, referring to local groups like the Syrian Democratic Forces that have partnered with the US in the fight against ISIS. “When they are capable of handing this threat on their own, without our assistance, that will be another key criteria indicating to me that we have accomplished our mission of defeat of ISIS.”
That criterion has not yet been met, though, and while ISIS is certainly far weaker as an organization than it was at its height, it’s still a long way from being truly “defeated” — no matter how badly Trump might want to believe otherwise.
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Breaking News: Trump just declared ISIS’s caliphate 100% defeated. But ISIS still remains. - News Paper
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