From: jeremyhdonovan@gmail.com

On Tuesday, November 17, 2015 at 5:27:17 PM UTC-8, Jeremy H. Denisovan wrote:

I think the best plan yet is a current U.S. plan, namely:

"Islamic State fighters in Raqqa seem more concerned about the
ground offensive being prepared by Kurdish militias that have
received American support."

Yes. We will support the Kurds tactically and with precision
airstrikes, while THEY go in after the crazy bastards.

If we can keep the Turks and the Kurds from fighting each other,
and we can avoid conflict with the Russians, that may work.

It did work. The Kurdish-led militia that was the heart of the
U.S. backed coalition to fight Isis is now launching an offensive
on the last major Isis stronghold in Hajin.

***

Fight to Retake Last ISIS Territory in Syria Begins

By Rukmini Callimachi
Sept. 11, 2018

http://tinyurl.com/yah4m25f

Excerpt:

The last vestige of Islamic State territory in Syria came under attack, as members of an American-backed coalition said Tuesday that they had begun a final push to oust the militants from Hajin, the remaining sliver of territory under the group’s
control in the region where it was born.

The assault is the final chapter of a war that began more than four years ago after the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, seized enormous tracts of land in Iraq and Syria and declared a caliphate.

The Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-led militia that has been fighting the Islamic State in Syria with the United States and its allies, said in a statement that its forces had launched an offensive on the area from four sides
on Monday evening.

The caliphate put the Islamic State on the map both physically and politically,
filling its coffers and swelling its ranks both there and abroad, where adherents committed attacks in its name.

Even if it is defeated in Hajin, however, the Islamic State is likely to remain
a powerful terrorist force.

Hajin does not look like much: On a bend of the Euphrates River in eastern Syria, it appears to have only a few major streets and just one public hospital. An estimated 60,000 people are believed to be living there and in a smattering of neighboring
villages.

The Syrian Democratic Forces is nevertheless preparing for a slog: between two and three months, according to one senior official with the militia.

Given Hajin’s size, that may seem a surprisingly long time. Islamic State-held cities with populations one and a half to three times larger, including Sinjar and Tal Afar in Iraq, fell in days.

The difference is that in those battles, the jihadists made a strategic retreat, choosing to abandon their positions to consolidate and regroup. This time, retreat is not an option.

“We expect a long and hard fight,” said Col. Sean J. Ryan, a spokesman for the American-led military coalition in Baghdad. “These are the die-hard fighters with nowhere else to go.”

In its remaining slip of land, the Islamic State has dug tunnels. Its fighters,
aerial surveillance indicates, have mined the circumference of their last redoubt, laying explosive devices on the roads leading into the area.

And to facilitate escape, they have buried large quantities of cash in berms of
sand and hidden weapons and ammunition in caves and underground passages, strategically positioning resources in the desert, analysts say.

The tunnels allow the militants to move from house to house, undetected from the air. Some passageways connect outposts to their military bases, said one resident reached by telephone who requested anonymity for fear of retribution.

Because they know the coalition is trying to minimize civilian casualties, the militants have trapped people in the town, monitoring the roads and posting snipers, one resident said.

The forces fighting the jihadists on the ground are a mix of Kurdish and Arab militias that have been working closely with an international coalition led by the United States to push back the jihadists.

The statement announcing the start of the campaign said that the coalition was providing air support for surveillance and to identify and hit targets. It was also coordinating with Iraqi artillery units to strike fixed Islamic State positions, the
statement said.

After the caliphate

Once in control of territory equivalent to the size of Britain, the Islamic State is down to its last 200 square miles, according to Colonel Ryan.

The group has lost all but 1 percent of the territory it held in Iraq and Syria, and its caliphate appears about to be erased in the region where it was born, though it continues to grow in outposts in Asia and Africa.

It has taken more than four years, over 29,000 airstrikes and thousands of soldiers’ lives for the American-led coalition to reclaim the group’s land holdings in Iraq and Syria. But the Islamic State remains a potent force.

Data collected by the United States Defense Department and the United Nations indicate that the group has as many fighters now as it did in 2014 — the height of the caliphate — with 20,000 to 31,500 members in Iraq and Syria alone, and thousands more
spread across the numerous other countries where it has implanted itself. If those figures are accurate, they match what the Central Intelligence Agency estimated as the group’s strength four years ago, when it ruled over a population of 12 million.

Senior officials at the Pentagon and in the White House say the real number is far lower. But a third report, to be published soon by the Center for Strategic
and International Studies, confirms the higher estimate, concluding that the Islamic State
still has as many as 25,000 fighters.

The Islamic State remains capable of wreaking damage around the world simply by
inspiring adherents to take up a gun, a bomb or even a car. And in Iraq and Syria, the group has reverted to an insurgency.

“The easy part is done, which is removing ISIS from the cities it controlled,” said Michael Knights, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Now comes the hard part.”

‘We just turned the clock back’

Politicians looking to score a public relations victory have taken to describing the Islamic State as defeated, even decimated. President Trump has gone so far as to use the phrase “absolutely obliterated.”

But analysts who have been studying the group since it implanted itself in Iraq
in the aftermath of the American invasion in 2003 point out that in the 15 years since then, the Islamic State held significant amounts of territory for only the last four.
They argue that the group, which went through four name changes before dubbing itself the Islamic State in 2014, will now revert to the organization it was before the caliphate.

“We look at that as the defining period of the Islamic State, but the caliphate itself was an outlier,” said Colin P. Clarke, a senior fellow at the Soufan Center, a New York-based research group on security threats and the author of a report on the
group.

Long before it declared a caliphate, the Islamic State was a formidable threat.
Now it will simply go back to its roots, analysts say.

“All we have succeeded in doing is returning to ISIS 1.0,” Mr. Knights said. “We just turned the clock back.”

Analysts tracking the Islamic State have used three types of data points to measure the group’s potency: the size of the territory under its control, its
troop strength, and the number and frequency of attacks.

If Hajin is retaken, the first of these indicators will be near zero. But the other two are another matter.

The Islamic State also remains well positioned to inspire attacks outside the Middle East, from small-scale assaults like the killing of four cyclists in Tajikistan this year to the truck attack in Nice, France, in 2016 in which more
than 80 people lost
their lives.

A shifting attack strategy

In Iraq and Syria, even with its territory greatly diminished, the Islamic State has persisted. Months after Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared “final victory” over the group in 2017, three Iraqi provinces have witnessed an uptick in violence.

Still, the violence there is less devastating than it once was. The group once routinely hit Baghdad with attacks that could kill more than 150 people at a time. Now it tends to carry out smaller suicide attacks, hit-and-runs, ambushes
and targeted
executions, especially of village chiefs, who are known as moktars.

Mr. Knights, who tracks these low-level assassinations, estimates that more than three moktars are killed or wounded every week in Iraq, undermining official declarations that the militants have been vanquished.

“That means that 14 times a month, the most important person in the village is killed or seriously injured by ISIS,” he said. “Under those circumstances, do those people feel like they have been liberated? Stopping this type of targeted violence is
the real challenge, and it’s much harder than clearing cities of ISIS fighters.”

***

Back to fighting smaller cells of terrorists again.

.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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