1. U.S.-led air campaign ramps up strikes on ISIS
More high-profile attacks expected as terror group loses more territory
WASHINGTON — The U.S.-led air campaign is ramping up its strikes against Islamic State truck bombs and the facilities that make them as the militant group is increasingly resorting to suicide attacks against civilian targets after being forced out of territory across Iraq and Syria.
The U.S.-led air campaign is ramping up its strikes against Islamic State truck bombs and the facilities that make them as the militant group is increasingly resorting to suicide attacks against civilian targets after being forced out of territory across Iraq and Syria.
“They’re kind of regressing back to being a terrorist organization,” Lt. Gen. Charles Brown, who commands U.S. air forces in the Middle East, said in an interview this week.
In April and May, coalition pilots struck 112 car and truck bombs in Iraq and Syria, about 20% of the total 550 vehicle bombs targeted in the nearly 2year-old air campaign, according to military statistics.
The Islamic State has managed to detonate massive car and truck bombs inside Baghdad in recent months. Iraq’s capital had been relatively secure, and the wave of car bombs are an effort by the militants to remain relevant despite battlefield losses, the Pentagon says.
The Islamic State is expected to “attempt more high-profile, headline-grabbing attacks to sow terror and to distract from the fact that they keep losing militarily on the battlefield,” said Col. Chris Garver, a military spokesman in Baghdad.
The air campaign had been criticized for getting off to a slow start two years ago. David Deptula, a retired three-star Air Force officer, said the campaign was initially too limited and only over the past year has it been expanded to include strategic targets aimed at targeting the militants’ oil revenues and cash warehouses.
The number of airstrikes in Iraq in the first five months of this year increased 42% over the same period a year ago.
Success in destroying many of those targets has forced the militants to retreat from territory they once controlled and withhold pay to some of their fighters as their finances continue to be squeezed, according to the Pentagon.
Coalition airstrikes destroyed an estimated $500 million in Islamic State cash stockpiles, reduced oil revenues by as much as 50% and forced the group out of 45% of the territory it once held in Iraq, the Pentagon said. The airstrikes are also supporting Iraqi ground forces, who have retaken Ramadi, a key Sunni city west of Baghdad, and are now engaged in fighting in Fallujah, a Sunni city about 35 miles from Baghdad.
“They can’t have the caliphate the way they probably envisioned it,” Brown said.
Progress in Syria is slower because the U.S.-led coalition has had to build a ground force from a patchwork of opposition groups operating in the country.
Still, U.S.-backed ground forces are getting closer to Raqqa, the group’s de facto capital, and are making gains near the Turkish border.
The group’s territorial ambitions provided the coalition with plenty of lucrative targets over the past year. Now the organization is moving in fewer numbers, presenting smaller targets, and is not operating in the open as much as in the past. That presents a new set of challenges for coalition commanders.
“How they resource themselves and those kinds of things won’t be as easy to go after,” Brown said. “By the same token it means we are actually making progress.”
U.S. military leaders say they are able to keep the pressure on the Islamic State even as the militants become more elusive on the battlefield.
“The flexibility of air power is allowing places to be hit several thousands of miles away near simultaneously or within the same hour,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Chris Karns, a military spokesman.
But there are limits to air power, especially when trying to root out a terror group that is made up of secret cells. It requires extensive intelligence in order to understand the group’s organization and leadership, said Michael Barbero, a retired Army lieutenant general who served three tours in Iraq.
The Islamic State grew out of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, a terror group that fought against the U.S.-led occupation following the ouster of dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003. Even with as many as 140,000 ground troops, commandos and drones providing surveillance, the U.S. military had difficulty targeting carbomb factories and other parts of the terror network, Barbero said.
For now, the Islamic State continues to operate as both a traditional terror organization and a group trying to hold terrain and govern. This month, coalition pilots attacked and destroyed 100 tanker trucks near Mosul that were being used by the Islamic State to move stolen oil, the Pentagon said.
In Syria, the defeat of the Islamic State in Raqqa is still years away, said Michael O’Hanlon, an analyst at Brookings Institution.
Brown, a fighter pilot, has encouraged planners to broaden the targets that can be attacked and keep the pressure on the Islamic State regardless of how it changes tactics.
“What I don’t want to do is miss opportunities,” he said.
Two former British prime ministers who played key roles in bringing peace to Northern Ireland warned Thursday that leaving the European Union could inflame political tensions and even lead to the breakup of the United Kingdom.
“Although Northern Ireland is more stable and prosperous than ever, that stability is poised on carefully constructed foundations,” the Labour Party’s Tony Blair said, appearing with his former Conservative Party rival John Major in Londonderry. “So we are naturally concerned at the prospect of anything that could put those foundations at risk.”
Major, who was prime minister for seven years before Blair’s 10 years, said a vote to leave the EU in the June 23 referendum would “destabilize the complicated and multilayered constitutional settlement that underpins stability in Northern Ireland.”
Major said if the UK were to leave the 28-nation political and economic coalition formed after World War II, that might spark an “uncontrollable and irresistible demand for a second independence referendum in Scotland.”
Scots voted against independence in 2014, but the issue has resurfaced with the looming EU referendum. A poll this week from research firm Kantar TNS showed 56% of Scots would vote No a second time if the United Kingdom left the EU.
The joint appearance by Blair and Major, two architects of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that stabilized decades of violence between Irish nationalist and British loyalist paramilitaries, comes two weeks before the high-stakes referendum.
The main issue has been what leaving the EU would mean for Britain’s economy, jobs and immigration. Pro-EU advocates argue that an exit from the bloc would jeopardize trade and other aspects of the economy. Those who want to leave say Britain would be better off on its own.
Northern Ireland’s population of 1.8 million is the smallest region in the UK, which also includes England, Scotland and Wales. It’s the only part of the United Kingdom to share a land border with the EU. The Republic of Ireland sits to its south. As EU members, there are no passport controls or other visible travel restrictions among the nations that share a 310-mile boundary.
“We are obviously concerned about the future of the border. Our open border is the biggest symbol, perhaps, of the normality and development of (Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland) relations,” said Dan Mulhall, Ireland’s ambassador to Britain, in a report published this month on the EU referendum.
“The fact is that no one can be 100% certain about what the impact of the border will be if the UK decides to exit the EU,” he said in the parliamentary report.
Hugh Orde, a former Northern Ireland police chief, wrote in a May 31 opinion piece in the
that the “vision of border controls plays into the hands of those who have yet to realize the armed struggle is over. I remember just how important demilitarization” on the border was for the peace process.
Britain’s Northern Ireland secretary Theresa Villiers said a British exit — or “Brexit” — from the EU would not derail the peace process.
“Whatever the result of the referendum, Northern Ireland is not going back to the troubles of its past, and to suggest otherwise would be highly irresponsible,” she said late Wednesday.
Lee McGowan, a political professor at Queen’s University in Belfast, said it was highly unlikely that a Brexit would lead to a return to violence on the streets of Northern Ireland, but it might undermine improving relations between the two main communities.
McGowan said if the UK were to pull Northern Ireland out of the EU against its wishes, some nationalists might try to use it to their advantage.
Polls show the majority of people in Northern Ireland want to stay in the EU. McGowan said it’s not clear what Northern Ireland voters would do if asked to choose between staying in the UK outside of the EU or become part of Ireland.
Former U.S. president Bill Clinton weighed in on the debate Thursday, writing in the
magazine that the EU helped ensure peace in Northern Ireland.