President Donald Trump has told the Pentagon to ‘annihilate’ the Islamic State group in Syria to prevent the escaped foreign fighters from returning home.
Instead of targeting jihadists as they leave a city, Trump has instructed the Pentagon to have jihadists encircled and killed, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Friday.
This campaign shows an increased urgency to stop battle-hardened jihadists from bringing their military expertise and ideology back to European capitals and other areas.
The president has ‘directed a tactical shift from shoving ISIS out of safe locations in an attrition fight to surrounding the enemy in their strongholds so we can annihilate ISIS,’ Mattis said, using an acronym for IS.
‘The intent is to prevent the return home of escaped foreign fighters.’
Though the campaign against IS fighters has been accelerated, Mattis said civilians in war zones were not put in greater risk, according to the New York Times.
Marine General Joe Dunford, who chairs the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also said the US is working successfully with Russia to ‘deconflict’ military operations in Syria.
Trump, who campaigned on a pledge to quickly defeat IS, signed an executive order soon after taking office giving his generals 30 days to come up with a revised plan to wipe the jihadists out.
The review resulted in the new ‘annihilation campaign’ and saw commanders gain greater autonomy to make battlefield decisions.
Critics of Barack Obama’s administration frequently complained of White House micromanagement and a lengthy approval process causing delays on the ground.
Mattis called foreign fighters a ‘strategic threat’ should they return home and said the annihilation effort would prevent the problem from being transplanted from one location to another.
The US-led coalition has been battling IS since late summer 2014, supporting local fighters on the ground with a combination of considerable air support, training and weaponry.
Trump this month authorized the United States to arm the Kurdish faction of an alliance fighting IS in northern Syria, much to the consternation of Turkey, which views them as terrorists.
Though the jihadists have lost 55 percent of the territory they once held in Iraq and Syria and over four million people have been liberated, IS still controls the Syrian stronghold Raqa, swaths of the Euphrates River valley and other areas including a small part of Mosul in Iraq.
Operations in Syria are further complicated by the country’s tangled knot of groups fighting in the civil war.
Russia joined that conflict in late 2015 to prop up President Bashar al-Assad, bringing a new dimension of complexity and risk.
Russia and the US have been working together successfully according to Dunford. The two sides established a hotline to inform each other of their forces’ location to avoid any mishaps.
Dunford hinted the US had a ‘proposal’ to further enhance deconfliction, but he didn’t give any details.
‘My sense is that the Russians are as enthusiastic as we are to deconflict operations and ensure that we can continue to take the campaign to ISIS and ensure the safety of our personnel,’ he said.
Separately, the Pentagon announced that Dunford has been nominated to serve a second two-year term in his job as the country’s top military officer.
Dunford told reporters that Russia and the US have been working together successfully to ‘deconflict’ military operations in Syria. Russian troops, left, stand guard as Syrian opposition fighters and their families board a bus at a checkpoint manned by regime forces ahead of their evacuation from Waer neighbourhood, the last opposition-held district in the central city of Homs, on May 20, 2017. In five months, the Syrian rebels, crushed by the regime’s troops backed by Russia and Iran, lost their stronghold Aleppo, Syria’s second city, their last quarters in Damascus and now the Waer district, their last bastion in Homs
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