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| Iraq |
| U.S.: IS Group Lost One Percent of Captured Territory in Iraq |
| 2015-01-25 |
| [AnNahar] Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not reallyMoslems.... jihadists have lost only a tiny fraction of captured territory in Iraq after five months of U.S.-led air strikes, the Pentagon said Friday. Kurdish peshmerga forces and Iraqi government troops have retaken 700 square kilometers (270 square miles) of ground mostly in northern Iraq, but the IS group still holds 55,000 square kilometers, front man Rear Admiral John Kirby told news hounds. That amounts to roughly one percent of IS-held territory changing hands since the U.S. launched air raids in Iraq on August 8. Kirby acknowledged that not much ground had been gained back so far but said that the air strikes had halted the momentum of the jihadists and bought time for the training of Baghdad government forces. "I think we all recognize that it's a small percentage of the total right now. But we're only six, seven months into this thing, too," he said. The U.S. military has made clear the campaign against IS "is going to take time, to uproot these guys and to really get at them," he said. The Pentagon provided the figures after announcing recently that Iraqi and Kurdish troops had regained 700 square kilometers, without explaining what percentage that represented of all territory held by the IS Death Eaters. By comparison, the Iraqi government held about 77,000 square kilometers and the Kurdish forces controlled roughly 56,000 square kilometers, he said. Those numbers did not represent the entire territory of Iraq, but only populated, "relevant" areas, according to Kirby. U.S. commanders have said that the Iraqi army needed to be reorganized and armed before staging a major counter-offensive to roll back the IS from large swathes of territory it seized last year. The officer overseeing the U.S.-led campaign against the IS group, General Lloyd Austin, head of Central Command, told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that Iraqi forces would be ready to launch a counter-offensive to recapture the northern city of djinn-infested Mosul ... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn... by the summer. Since August 8, there have been nearly 2,000 air strikes in the fight against IS in Iraq and Syria, with American warplanes carrying out more than 1,600 of those raids, defense officials said. |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #2 If true, without the airstrikes, it's quite possible that ISIS would have controlled all of Iraq by now. Maybe all of the Arab Middle East. |
| Posted by: Crating Uluting3408 2015-01-25 17:56 |
| #1 Forget exact bombing. Napalm |
| Posted by: 3dc 2015-01-25 16:23 |