Trump: ISIS driven from Syria territory
Fighting continues between militants, U.S.-backed forces
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Islamic State militants no longer control any territory in Syria, President Donald Trump announced Friday, though the U.S. was launching airstrikes and sporadic fighting continued on the ground against the group’s holdouts.
“It’s about time,” Trump said on an airport tarmac in Florida.
He held up maps indicating the territory once held by the ISIS group in Iraq and Syria had shrunk to nothing.
Elimination of the last ISIS stronghold in Baghouz in eastern Syria would mark the end of the militants’ self-declared caliphate, which at its height blanketed large parts of Syria and Iraq. The campaign to take back the territory by the U.S. and its partners has spanned five years and two U.S. presidencies, unleashed more than 100,000 bombs and killed untold numbers of fighters and civilians.
Controlling territory and assets, such as oil facilities, has given the group a stream of revenue and a place from which to launch attacks around the world. But, if history is a guide, the reconquering of ISIS-held territory could prove a short-lived victory unless Iraq and Syria fix a problem that gave rise to the extremist movement in the first place: governments pitting one ethnic or sectarian group against another.
Trump has been teasing the victory for days, most recently Wednesday when he said the milestone would be achieved that night.
On Friday, after a flight to Florida, Trump held up a map to supporters cheering him on the tarmac. Then he turned to reporters standing nearby.
“Here’s ISIS on Election Day,” he said, linking coalition gains since then to his presidency. He pointed to a swath of red signifying the group’s previous territorial hold, and then to a version without any red, “Here’s ISIS right now.”
But Trump appeared to be overstating his administration’s contribution to the anti-IS fight. A close-up of the map showed he was displaying the group’s footprint at a high point in 2014, not Election Day 2016, by which point the U.S.-backed campaign was well underway.
And American officials familiar with the situation in Syria said the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces — who had not announced victory and weren’t planning to Friday — were battling remaining ISIS fighters who were holed up in tunnels along river cliffs in Baghouz. Another official confirmed the U.S. launched airstrikes there Friday and that the fighting continued to clear out final pockets of ISIS members.
Associated Press journalists in Baghouz said coalition fighters were conducting mop-up operations in the village after seizing an encampment Tuesday where the extremists had been for months. SDF spokesman Kino Gabriel told AP earlier Friday that there were ISIS fighters and women and children hiding in caves near Baghouz.
He said final operations were ongoing and there appeared to be several hundred people inside.
Other SDF officials said the camp was full of corpses, and some civilians and ISIS fighters were handing themselves over.
As the militants have put up a desperate, last-ditch fight for weeks, they have kept up their recruiting efforts, as Trump said.
“ISIS uses the internet better than almost anyone, but for all those susceptible to ISIS propaganda, they are now being beaten badly at every level,” the president tweeted. “They will always try to show a glimmer of vicious hope, but they are losers and barely breathing.”
The coalition siege has been slowed by the unexpectedly large number of civilians in Baghouz, most of them families of ISIS members. In recent weeks, they have been flowing out, exhausted, hungry and often wounded. The sheer number who emerged — nearly 30,000 since early January, according to Kurdish officials — surprised the Syrian Democratic Forces.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaking in Jerusalem, said Thursday the U.S.-led coalition had achieved “amazing” results in Syria.
But he said, “The threat from radical Islamic terrorism remains.”