Ari Fleischer: Democrats are facing a crisis
Fox News contributor Ari Fleischer expressed concern by the liberal media over Biden’s performance at the CNN presidential debate, saying Democrats were shocked because they had never seen such worrisome behavior from Biden before.
- A decade after declaring its caliphate, ISIS no longer controls any land, has lost many leaders, and is mostly out of the news.
- The group continues to recruit members and carry out deadly attacks globally, including recent actions in Iran and Russia.
- ISIS clandestine cells in Syria and Iraq continue to attack government forces and US-backed Syrian fighters.
A decade later Islamic State The terrorist group has declared a caliphate across large parts of Iraq and Syria, the extremists no longer hold any land, have lost several key leaders and have mostly disappeared from world news headlines.
Still, the group continues to recruit members and claim responsibility for deadly attacks around the world, including deadly campaigns in Iran and Russia earlier this year that killed scores of people. Its sleeper cells in Syria and Iraq still carry out attacks against government forces in both countries as well as US-backed Syrian fighters, at a time when Iraq’s government is in talks with Washington over a possible withdrawal of American troops.
The group, which once attracted thousands of fighters and supporters from around the world to come to Syria and Iraq, and at its peak ruled an area half the size of the United Kingdom, was notorious for its brutality. It beheaded civilians, murdered 1,700 captured Iraqi soldiers in a short time, and enslaved and raped thousands of women from the Yazidi community, one of Iraq’s oldest religious minorities.
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“Daesh continues to pose a threat to international security,” U.S. Army Maj. Gen. J.B. Vowell, commanding general of the Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve, said in comments sent to The Associated Press. Daesh is the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group.
Iraqi army soldiers celebrate holding an Islamic State group flag captured during a military operation to retake control of a village outside Mosul, Iraq, November 29, 2016. Ten years after the Islamic State group declared its caliphate across large parts of Iraq and Syria, the extremists no longer hold any land, have lost several key founding leaders and are mostly out of the world news headlines. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban, File)
“We maintain our intensity and resolve to fight and destroy the remnants of groups that share the Daesh ideology,” Wavell said.
In recent years, the group’s branches have grown stronger around the world, mainly in Africa and Afghanistan, but its leadership is believed to be in Syria. The four group leaders who have been killed since 2019 were all killed in Syria.
In 2013, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, then the leader of the Islamic State group in Iraq, which was created as an offshoot of al-Qaeda, separated himself from al-Qaeda’s global network and clashed with its branch in Syria, then known as the Nusra Front. The group renamed itself the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant and launched a military campaign during which it seized large parts of Syria and Iraq.
In early June 2014, the group seized control of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, following the collapse of the Iraqi army. Later that month, it opened the border between areas it controlled in Syria and Iraq.
On 29 June 2014, al-Baghdadi appeared as a man in black robes to deliver a sermon from the pulpit of Mosul’s Great Mosque of al-Nuri, in which he declared a caliphate and urged Muslims worldwide to swear allegiance to him and obey him as their leader. Since then, the group has identified itself as the Islamic State.
“Al-Baghdadi’s preaching — expanding on the extremist ideology of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — continues to inspire ISIS members globally,” said retired U.S. Army officer Miles B. Caggins III, a senior nonresident fellow at the New Lines Institute and a former spokesman for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. He was referring to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, who was killed in a U.S. strike in 2006.
From a self-proclaimed caliphate, the group has planned deadly attacks and carried out brutal killings around the world, including the beheading of Western journalists, locking a Jordanian pilot in a cage and setting him on fire days after his fighter plane was shot down, and locking opponents in giant metal cages and drowning them in ponds.
A coalition of more than 80 countries led by the United States was formed to fight IS and for a decade this coalition has been raiding terrorist hideouts in Syria and Iraq.
Iraqi army soldiers secure roads in a village recently liberated from Islamic State militants outside Mosul, Iraq, December 1, 2016. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban, File)
The war against IS officially ended in March 2019, when fighters from the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces captured the eastern Syrian town of Baghouz, the last piece of land controlled by the extremists.
Before the loss of Baghouz, IS was defeated in Iraq in July 2017, when Iraqi forces captured the northern city of Mosul. Three months later, IS suffered a major setback when the SDF captured the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, the group’s de facto capital.
United Nations He says the group still has between 5,000 and 7,000 fighters in Syria and Iraq.
Still, at least in Iraq, government and military officials have claimed the group is too weak to return.
“It is not possible for IS to claim a caliphate again. They do not have the command or control capability to do so,” Iraqi army Maj. Gen. Tahseen al-Khafaji told AP at the Baghdad-based headquarters of the Joint Special Operations Command, a headquarters staffed by Iraqi officers and U.S.-led coalition forces to oversee operations against the extremists.
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This command was formed to conduct operations against the group just a few weeks after the declaration of the caliphate, and is still active.
Al-Khafaji said IS now has created sleeper cells in caves and remote areas in the desert as Iraqi security forces force them to flee. He said during the first five months of the year, Iraqi forces carried out 35 airstrikes against IS and killed 51 of its members.
Sabah al-Noman of the Iraqi Counterterrorism Service at headquarters said that after losing its grip on Iraq, the terrorist group is now focusing mainly on Africa, particularly the Sahel region, to try to gain a foothold there.
Smoke rises as Iraq’s elite counterterrorism forces battle Islamic State militants for control of the al-Bakr area in Mosul, Iraq, December 12, 2016. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban, File)
“It is not possible for them to take control of a village, let alone an Iraqi city,” he said. He added that the US-led coalition is constantly conducting reconnaissance and surveillance to provide intelligence to Iraqi forces, and the security forces “deal with this information directly.”
Although IS appears to be in control of Iraq, it has killed dozens of government forces and SDF fighters in Syria over the past several months.
“Daesh terrorist cells are continuing their terrorist operations,” said SDF spokesman Siamand Ali. “They are present on the ground and operating at a higher level than in previous years.”
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In Northeastern SyriaDuring 2014, SDF fighters have been guarding some 10,000 IS fighters in about two dozen detention centers – including 2,000 foreigners whose home countries have refused to repatriate them.
The SDF also looks after about 33,000 family members of suspected IS fighters, most of them women and children, who live in the heavily guarded al-Hol camp, seen as a breeding ground for future extremists.
Their worst attack since the group’s defeat came in January 2022, when extremists attacked the Kurdish-run Gueran prison or al-Sinaa in Syria’s northeast, which houses thousands of IS militants. The attack led to 10 days of fighting between SDF fighters and IS militants, which left around 500 dead on both sides, before the SDF brought the situation under control.
Caggins said the US-led coalition’s “military advice and assistance” to the Iraqi security forces, Kurdish Iraqi fighters and the SDF “is essential to maintaining dominance against surviving ISIS members, as well as to safeguard the more than 10,000 ISIS detainees being held in temporary prisons and camps in Syria.”
