The U.S. military says the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has only about half as many fighters as it did at its peak and has lost 65 percent of the territory it once controlled.
In a briefing with reporters at the Pentagon, a senior defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said it’s believed ISIS is down to about 15,000 fighters, with about 2,500 left in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, and 3,000 to 4,000 in Raqqa, Syria.
Pentagon officials say it’s hard to get an accurate count of ISIS fighters, and that the numbers represent “best guess” estimates.
In the past, U.S. military officials said as many as 50,000 ISIS members have been killed since 2014, with a steady flow of foreign fighters replenishing the ranks keeping the overall force numbers around 20,000 to 25,000.
But with ISIS surrounded in it self-proclaimed capitals of Mosul and Raqqa, the flow of reinforcements has dropped dramatically, and ISIS has been pressing children and elderly recruits into battle, the defense official told reporters.
ISIS is increasingly desperate, she said, executing foreign fighters to keep them from deserting, and unable in many cases to mount coordinated attacks and counter attacks due to the deaths of so many battlefield commanders killed by drone strikes and air attacks by the coalition.
“We found that taking out those mid-level leaders was very effective in limiting their ability to mount a coherent defense, to conduct synchronized or coordinated counter attacks,” the briefer said. “I think they are fractured and confused at times.”
While the U.S. is not putting a timeline on the total defeat of ISIS in both Iraq and Syria, the current thinking is that given steady progress the major population centers in Iraq should be free of ISIS in six months, but that the hard core elements of the terrorist group will likely go underground and transform into an insurgency.
ISIS leaders appear to know their days are numbered in Raqqa and have already begun to move some key people out of the city to establish a base of operations somewhere else in Syria, but they show no signs of surrender.
“I don’t think they have given up on their vision of a caliphate yet,” the official said. “I think they still believe they can function and are making plans to continue to function as a pseudo state centered in the Euphrates River valley.”
As for the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, his whereabouts are unknown, although he is believed to have fled Mosul before it was isolated by Iraq forces and is hiding somewhere in Iraq.
But the U.S official downplayed the importance of killing what she called “the head of the snake.”
“The same way we didn’t defeat Nazi Germany by taking out Hitler, or we did not defeat the Japanese Imperial Army by killing Yamamoto, it’s very important for us to kill the battlefield commanders in order to defeat the army,” she said.
