U.S. soldiers say ISIS is fighting to the death
ABOARD THE USS NIMITZ, in the Persian Gulf — A few days ago, Capt. Mike Spencer of the Marines rocketed off the flight deck of an aircraft carrier in his F-18 to provide air support for Iraqi troops advancing on the dusty city of Tal Afar, one of the Islamic State’s last strongholds.
A busy six hours followed in the skies over Iraq. As Islamic State fighters fired on Iraqi forces from a building, Spencer dropped precision-guided munitions on them, destroying the structure and presumably killing the men inside. A short while later, he was ordered to take out another Islamic State fighting position nearby. He did so, and then eliminated another.
When he ran out of bombs, Spencer headed back to the Nimitz.
The Risk board that is the map of Iraq may show almost certain defeat for the Islamic State as its territory continues to shrink, but U.S. officials say the pace of the fight is not slowing. The aircraft carrier Nimitz, where Spencer commands a Marine squadron, is launching as many sorties and strikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria as other U.S. aircraft carriers were doing three years ago, after President Barack Obama opened the bombing campaign.
The militants have lost a long list of cities and towns in Iraq — Baqouba, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit, Mosul and, now, Tal Afar, which the Iraqi prime minister declared liberated Thursday — and are under attack from all sides in a desperate fight over Raqqa, their self-proclaimed capital in Syria. But one would never know it from the way the extremists have continued to fight, U.S. soldiers and Marines say.
“We definitely have the offensive,” Spencer said. But, he added, “they have resigned themselves that they’re going to fight to the bitter end, and they are going to take as many of us with them as possible.”
From Raqqa to Mosul to Nangarhar province in Afghanistan, the presumed victors in the war against the Islamic State paint a picture of an insurgency that has not yet seemed to realize it is on its heels. The Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, on Thursday cast the fight in stark terms. “Wherever you are, we are coming for liberation, and you have no option but to surrender or die,” he said.
While small numbers of fighters are surrendering, with some fleeing to Turkey, many more are dying. Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, the U.S. commander of the war effort against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, said the final days of combat this summer in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, resembled the worst fighting he had witnessed “in 35 years.”
“They’re fighting like a conventional army fights,” said Maj. Jarrod A. Devore, another Marine fighter pilot stationed on the Nimitz.
Once U.S.-backed troops move on, the militants often return, no matter how intense the bombing campaign had been. The case of what is known as the Mother of All Bombs illustrates the militants’ determination.
On April 13, Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., U.S. commander of the war effort in Afghanistan, ordered forces to drop the huge weapon, the most powerful conventional bomb in the U.S. arsenal, on an Islamic State cave complex in the Achin district of Nangarhar, a remote area of eastern Afghanistan.
It remains unclear how many Islamic State fighters were killed in the bombing, but the fighting is still intense. The tunnel complex where the giant bomb was dropped has not remained clear of Islamic State fighters and many have returned.
“They’re already proving that they’re willing to go back into the area where the MOAB dropped,” Anderson said. “They’re there today.”