One year after the Islamic State’s declaration of a caliphate across Iraq and Syria, the U.S. has not seen a decrease in the number of fighters on the battlefield, nor a reduction in the terror group’s capabilities to conduct or inspire terrorist attacks.
“We said a year ago we expected this fight to expel [the Islamic State] from Iraq to be a fight that takes years,” said outgoing Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren.
In June 2014, the Islamic State moved through a lightning-fast takeover of Mosul and Tikrit after the collapse of the Iraqi Army, a failure that would ultimately lead to the return of U.S. airstrikes against Iraqi targets starting that August and the return of U.S. forces that November.
In the past year, the U.S. has spent more than $2.74 billion to conduct airstrikes against 7,655 Islamic State-captured Humvees, tanks, buildings, vehicles and fighting positions. It has sent more than 3,500 U.S. forces back into Iraq and completed the basic training of 7,000 new recruits for the Iraqi Army. Despite these efforts, the Islamic State still has roughly the same number of fighters on the ground — 20,000 to 30,000, based on U.S. estimates. Tikrit was liberated but Ramadi fell; Beiji is “contested” and Mosul is still Islamic State-controlled.
The group has globally metastasized; spawning affiliates and even more loosely-associated lone wolf actors carrying out acts of violence in the group’s name. In the past week, the group has been blamed for hundreds of civilian deaths in the town of Kobani, Syria; at a Shiite mosque in Kuwait City; a beach resort in Sousse, Tunisia; and a gas refinery in Lyon, France.
When the Pentagon discusses its gains against the Islamic State, it puts it in terms of the group’s ability to move en masse around Iraq and the amount of territory the group controls.
Based on the Defense Department’s estimates, the group controls 25 percent less territory than it did a year ago, but it did not have maps immediately available to show the differences in the territory under Islamic State control in 2014 compared to now. “We believe we are having an impact on [the Islamic State],” Warren said. “That said, they are still capable of conducting limited-in-scope attacks.”
