The Pentagon and the State Department offered very different accounts of the U.S.-led coalition fight against the Islamic State on Thursday, with two cabinet secretaries disputing how much success the United States is having against the self-declared Sunni caliphate that controls much of Iraq and Syria.
U.S. ambassador to Iraq Stuart Jones in at least two interviews over the last 24 hours claimed that the U.S.-led airstrikes had killed 6,000 fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Secretary of State John Kerry, meeting in London Thursday with coalition members to discuss the Islamic State fight, doubled down on Jones’ claims.
But outgoing Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel expressed doubt about the State Department’s body count claims.
In London, Kerry said nearly 2,000 airstrikes over the past five months have taken out 50 percent of the Islamic State’s top command. He also said the coalition has helped the Iraqis reclaim 700 square kilometers (434 square miles) the group had seized in its bloody march across Iraq last summer.
Kerry also said the coalition bombing has destroyed hundreds of vehicles and tanks, which the Islamic State captured from Iraqi forces, and nearly 200 oil and gas facilities they were using have been eliminated from their capacity to generate revenue.
Hagel downplayed those claims, however, telling reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday that he couldn’t confirm the 6,000 body count figure and discounted its importance.
“I have not seen any verification of that number that you referred to,” Hagel told a reporter. “We do know that thousands of [Islamic State] fighters have been killed, and that we do know that some of [the Islamic State’s] leadership have been killed.”
He then said he didn’t think the number of body counts was a significant measure of progress in the fights against the Islamic State.
“I was in a war with a lot of body counts — and we lost that war,” he said. Kerry and Hagel are both Vietnam veterans.
Hagel, who is slated to step down after the Senate confirms his successor, was somewhat optimistic about the war against the Islamic State, but his comments were decidedly less cheery than Kerry’s. In London, Kerry cited reports from Mosul that Islamic State fighters are not getting paid or receiving far less compensation than what their leaders originally promised them.
“In recent months, we have seen, definitively, [the Islamic State]’s momentum halted in Iraq, and in some cases reversed,” Kerry told reporters at a news conference in London. “As President Obama and other leaders have said from the beginning, will be neither short nor easy — that has been a consistent statement — today we are seeing important gains along all the lines.”
For his part, Hagel noted that the “What you look at is things like, ‘do you have [the Islamic State] on the defensive?’ And I think by every measurement, not imperfect, not perfect, they have been on the defensive.” He noted that the group is also having difficulty recruiting.
Hagel’s spokesman, Rear Adm. John Kirby, echoed his boss, saying Thursday that the U.S. is adamant about not keeping a “body count” in the Islamic State mission, and that doing so would be similar to Vietnam War-era statistics.
U.S. officials estimate that the Islamic State has anywhere between 9,000 and 18,000 fighters but other U.S. intelligence agencies estimates put the figure much higher — to as many as 31,000.
The Senate plans to consider the nomination of Ashton Carter to succeed Hagel in February.
