President Trump has repeatedly claimed he “obliterated” ISIS, but new reports say the terror group is alive and rebounding.
Estimates by the UN and the U.S. Defense Department put the number of ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria at 30,000 — roughly equal to its peak.
Under initiatives launched during the Obama administration, the U.S. and its allies have greatly reduced the amount of land held by the terrorist group. But foreign-affairs experts say that ISIS has actually regrouped in the last year and may be gearing up for overseas attacks now that the size of its territory has shrunk, reports HuffPost.
“Despite the damage to bureaucratic structures of the so-called ‘caliphate,’ the collective discipline of ISIL is intact,” says a July 27 report commissioned by the U.N. Security Council. “The general security and finance bureaus of ISIL are intact.”
“They haven’t been obliterated,” Seth Jones, a former senior officer in the Defense Department and now a lecturer at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told HuffPost. “They certainly haven’t been crushed or defeated such that they are no longer present. They are present.”
Although the Trump administration has simply continued the Obama policy of liberating ISIS-held territory with airstrikes, Trump has repeatedly asserted that he’s outperformed his predecessor. “We’ve done more against ISIS in nine months than the previous administration has done during its whole administration — by far, by far,” he said in October, later repeating the claim by updating the number of months.
But the Defense Department is taking a more ominous line. “We have assessed that, even after the liberation of ISIS controlled territory, ISIS probably is still more capable than al-Qaida in Iraq at its peak in 2006-2007 ― when the group had declared an Islamic State and operated under the name Islamic State of Iraq ― suggesting it is well positioned to rebuild and work on enabling its physical caliphate to reemerge,” said spokesman Cmdr. Sean Robertson this week. “ISIS will remain a regional and global threat even after their military defeat. ISIS will take full advantage of any opportunity, including any abatement of pressure, to regain its momentum by attempting to retake previously liberated territory and fleeing more permissive areas.”
In fact, ISIS fighters have said that Trump xenophobic rhetoric helps their cause, reported Politico magazine. “I think he is good for us,” a Canadian ISIS fighter told the magazine’s Amarnath Amarasingam in March 2017. “We needed someone like him, who is direct … I mean, with no hidden agendas or behind-the-scenes plots. He is clear and everyone, even the kuffar [infidels], know that he hates Muslims.”
