A new claim that American-led airstrikes have killed 10,000 Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria in nine months is backfiring on the administration, as officials had said months earlier that body counts are not the way to gauge success, and because officials had few other details to back up the claim.
The lack of any additional information is also making it hard for skeptics of President Obama’s war against the terrorist group to square the body count claim with the news they see every day about the Islamic State seizing control of new cities in Iraq and Syria.
Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken cited the figure Wednesday at a Paris conference that focused on how to stop the Islamic State advances, which ended without any announcements about a change in strategy.
The new figure, an increase of 4,000 deaths since U.S. officials said they had killed 6,000 fighters back in January, was released on the same day that a poll showed flagging support for the Obama administration’s handling of the Islamic State threat.
A CNN poll released Wednesday shows that just 32 percent of Americans support Obama’s strategy against the Islamic State, down eight points from the last poll in February.
Pressed Wednesday about the plummeting poll numbers, White House press secretary Josh Earnest brushed aside the findings.
“The president is not designing our strategy around this military conflict based on monthly poll numbers, but he’s doing it based on the national security interests of the United States,” he said. “…That’s why the president continues to believe it’s not in our best interests to essentially re-invade Iraq to try to solve this problem.”
Instead, Earnest said, Obama is sticking to the plan to depend on a U.S.-led international coalition to help support the Iraqi security forces in taking the fight to the Islamic State in their own country.
“That’s the strategy that we’re going to continue to pursue, and it’s a strategy that has shown some success but obviously there’s a lot more work to be done,” he added.
Still, the 10,000 body count announcement appeared aimed at pushing back against the widespread criticism of Obama’s record amid new reports that the Islamic State is positioning itself to take Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, aided by the forces of President Bashar al-Assad, after successfully retaking the Iraqi city of Ramadi just two weeks ago.
The figure, however, prompted more questions than it answered. The administration faced a barrage of questions on Wednesday about the methodology behind the 10,000 figure and offered very few details about the metrics behind it.
“We’ve been saying for quite some time that we’ve taken out thousands of ISIL fighters,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said. “I don’t think I have much more specifics to add in terms of methodology.”
“[Blinken] was saying, certainly, this is a more specific estimate of what we’ve said in the past, and that’s all he was trying to indicate today,” she added.
Earnest referred reporters to the Department of Defense for a precise number, even though the Pentagon has never used a hard body count figure. Back in January, then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel also pointedly dismissed the importance of body counts as a way to gauge the fight against the Islamic State.
“I was in a war with a lot of body counts — and we lost that war,” he said at that time.
Reporters pushed for more information, demanding to know how many fighters the administration now estimates the Islamic State has and whether those figures are now 10,000 lower, or whether the extremist group has managed to replenish its numbers with new recruits.
A year ago, U.S. officials estimated the number of Islamic State fighters at 20,000 but later revised that number upward to 30,000. If the U.S.-led airstrikes had managed to kill 10,000 fighters, reporters wanted to know, then have their numbers diminished by one-third?
Harf quickly cautioned that the calculation was not a matter of simple subtraction.
“They have attempted to and have been able to in cases replace fighters from either internally or from other places, something we’re concerned about,” she said.
Pressed for a best estimate for the total number of Islamic State fighters, however, Harf could not cite a number or respond to a question about whether the group is replenishing their numbers at the same rate the coalition is killing them.
Instead, she quickly repeated Hagel’s argument that the body count is “not the metric that we judge the effectiveness of the military action.”
But without any other metric to go on, critics seized on the new figure and said it’s hardly a sign of progress.
“I can’t argue body counts with them but I can make a cogent argument that we’re not winning — we’re losing,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told the Washington Examiner in an interview. “No matter how many bodies there are, the fact is that you look at the successes they’re enjoying and it’s attracting many thousands more to their banner because they’re winning.”
Sen. Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was more succinct.
The fight against the Islamic State, he said, “is obviously not going very well.”
