The military’s top enlisted leader says Islamic State fighters must surrender or face a range of violent deaths at the hands of U.S. troops, to include being shot in the face or beaten to death with entrenching tools.
Army Command Sgt. Maj. John Wayne Troxell made the threats in a tweet and Facebook post on Tuesday evening. He is the military’s senior enlisted adviser to Gen. Joe Dunford, the Joint Chiefs chairman, and its most senior noncommissioned officer.
“ISIS needs to understand that the Joint Force is on orders to annihilate them. So, they have two options should they decide to come up against the United States, our allies and partners: surrender or die!” Troxell wrote on Facebook. “If they surrender, we will safeguard them to their detainee facility cell, provide them chow, a cot and due process.
“If they choose not to surrender, then we will kill them with extreme prejudice, whether that be through security force assistance, by dropping bombs on them, shooting them in the face, or beating them to death with our entrenching tools.”
The military has virtually defeated the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria under President Trump, who delegated more authority to commanders to wage the fight.
Trump lauded Defense Secretary Jim Mattis last month for “knocking the hell” out of the terror group with a new strategy that included surrounding the enemy forces and eliminating them.
Critics had complained that the Obama administration tried to micromanage the military effort and mistakenly focused on winding down the U.S. offensive without eliminating the threat.
