TRUMP ON IRAQ: Even though his new ramped-up strategy to “obliterate” ISIS is still a least a month away from completion, President Trump says things are going “very well” in Iraq, where Iraqi forces are engaged in what the U.S. ground commander calls “the most significant urban combat to take place since World War II” in their slow but steady fight to liberate Mosul. Speaking at a White House reception last night, the president said he had just received an update from Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. “He knows better than anybody we’re doing very well in Iraq,” Trump said. “Our soldiers are fighting, and fighting like never before, and the results are very, very good.”
The president’s upbeat remarks (a turnaround from previous comments calling the Mosul operation a “disaster”) come as the number of civilians dying in U.S.-led airstrikes is drawing increased scrutiny, and putting U.S. commanders on the defensive, as they try to explain why what’s touted as the most precise bombing campaign in the history of modern warfare still has days when things go wrong. Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend’s frustration seemed to boil over at the end of a 45-minute session with Pentagon reporters yesterday, as he tried to make the case that while there is “a fair chance” a U.S.-led coalition airstrike may have contributed to the deaths of more than 100 Iraqi civilians trapped in a building in Mosul, it was ISIS, not the U.S. who is to blame. The investigation of the Mosul deaths will take some weeks, but Townsend said evidence suggests the victims of the March 17 incident may have been forced to stay as hostages in a building rigged with explosives. “I would say this — that it sure looks like they were,” Townsend said in an audio briefing from Baghdad. “I know this: I’m not targeting civilians; ISIS is. And so we will do the best job we absolutely can to prevent this unnecessary loss of life.”
