Members of the Iraqi Emergency Response Division walk with their weapons in Mosul. REUTERS/Ahmed Jadallah
Kimberley Dozier, Daily Beast: U.S. Commandos Running Out of ISIS Targets
Trump may have unleashed the dogs of war, but U.S. special operations forces are running out of top ISIS figures to kill—because the strategy Obama put in place is working.
U.S. special operations forces have removed roughly 50 top ISIS leaders off the battlefield since President Donald Trump took office, down from 80 killed in the last six months of the Obama administration, according to figures obtained by The Daily Beast.
“The pace and the way they have gone about going after these HVT’s [High-value targets] hasn’t changed,” said coalition spokesman Col. Ryan Dillon of the U.S. special operations’ campaign to take ISIS commanders off the Iraqi and Syrian battlefields.
Those closest to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi have been hit hardest. “Most of them were killed in the last year of the Obama administration,” he said. “If there was a block chart of Baghdadi and all of his bubbas, we are hitting the fifth- and sixth-string leaders of the organization.”
Coalition air strikes have increased under Trump, rising from an average of roughly 440 a month in the last six months of 2016 to just under 800 a month now, as coalition forces have liberated most of Mosul in Iraq, and breached ISIS’ Syrian capital of Raqqa. But the lower numbers of high-value targets killed points to the deadly success of the strategy built by the Obama White House.
Read more ....
WNU Editor: Kimberley Dozier in the above post gives President Obama's strategy to defeat the Islamic State as the main reason why ISIS is now collapsing. Soldiers on the ground in Syria have a different point of view .... Washington Post David Ignatius: Fighters In Syria Cheer At Mention Of Trump Name (July 5, 2017). What's my take? Some credit should be given to both President Obama and President Trump .... but the ones who should get the most credit are the civilians and military forces on the ground who are waging war against ISIS, their commanders who have been given the tools and the right rules of engagement, the Generals who must coordinate all of this, and lastly the families back home in Iraq/Syria/and the U.S. who support their loved ones who are in the middle of this conflict.
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