The U.S.-led coalition fighting the self-proclaimed Islamic State is zeroing in on the terrorist group’s core territory and leadership, and is breaking down the group’s morale, Brett McGurk, the Obama administration’s anti-Islamic State czar said on Friday.
“We are getting closer and closer and closer to the very core, and so it’s really a matter of time for him,” McGurk said, referring both to coalition forces closing in on the “caliphate’s” capital of Raqqa, Syria as well as the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
“We are killing one of their senior or mid-level leaders once every three days now,” McGurk said in his update on the counter-ISIS campaign. “We’ve taken out about 100 just over the last few months alone.”
As a result, McGurk said morale, particularly among the foreign fighters the Islamic State works so hard to recruit, has plummeted.
“We’re seeing them execute their own fighters on the battlefield; we’re seeing them unable to move fighters around the battlefield; and we’re seeing the recruits fall off precipitously,” McGurk reported. “So their morale is plummeting; they’re executing their own fighters.”
Their spokesman, Muhammad Adnani, “has talked for years about this movement… as a global, historic, expanding movement,” McGurk said. “Every single thing they would say in their propaganda is that we are going to retain and expand our territories, constantly going to expand.”
Now Adnani has a different message, McGurk said. Adnani “actually said, ‘you know, we might lose Raqqa, we might lose Mosul’—which they will—’and we might lose Sirte, but we’re still going to be around. So, come join us anyway,'” McGurk mimicked Adnani, ticking off key Syrian and Iraqi cities under ISIS control.
Coalition forces have retaken 50 percent of territory once held by the Islamic State, or ISIS or ISIL.
McGurk said the number of ISIS fighters has dropped from roughly 31,000 in the summer of 2014 to 19,000-25,000 today.
“Their ability to get fighters in is much restricted” now, McGurk noted.
Additionally, pressure from coalition forces has decreased the Sunni terrorist group’s oil production by 30 percent, McGurk said.
“We think we’ve cut off entirely their revenue that’s coming from the outside,” he added. “They rely entirely on self-generation.”
As local and coalition forces retake territory, they have to contend with the terrorists’ barbarism, McGurk said.
“[T]his is how barbaric ISIL is and why we have to wipe them off this map,” he said. Before they left the Iraqi city of Ramadi, they booby-trapped almost every home during their retreat.
“So of the 70,000 people that returned to Ramadi, about 100 of them tragically were killed” after finding “a booby-trap in their closet or in their refrigerator,” McGurk said.
The coalition has raised money and brought in experts to help clear homes of such devices now after local forces retake a town, he said.
As coalition allies have successfully sealed most of the Syrian border, Islamic State leaders increasingly are encouraging would-be recruits to head to Libya instead, McGurk said.
“We have a lot of work to do in Libya; don’t get me wrong,” he acknowledged. “But we now have, I think, some traction in how to go after it. And those effects are now starting to be seen on the ground. But it will take time and we have to work it step-by-step.”
