The United States has lowered the number of soldiers it believes are fighting for the Islamic State, a White House official said on Thursday.
The intelligence community now believes the group has approximately 25,000 members in Iraq and Syria, down from its previous estimate of 31,500, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.
That decrease is good news, Earnest said, “because it’s moving in the right direction. We sort of at least for now have been able to reverse this trend; what had been a sort of a steady growth in the ranks of their fighters is now declining.”
Earnest said the global crackdown on preventing would-be Islamic State foot soldiers from traveling to the region has paid off.
“[F]oreign fighters are having a more difficult time entering Syria … because we’ve been able to work effectively with the international community to make that kind of travel more difficult and to apprehend people before they make those kinds of trips,” Earnest said. “It’s also a testament to some of the improvements that the Turks have made in securing the border between Turkey and Syria.”
Earnest acknowledged that the new, bigger estimate for its numbers in lawless Libya is a disturbing trend, however.
“[W]e’ve been mindful of the fact that they might be looking to spread other places, like Libya, and even like Afghanistan,” Earnest said, answering a question about the intelligence community’s assessment that the Islamic State now has 5,000 armed acolytes in Libya, up from an estimated 2,000-3,000.
“We’re going to continue to watch how the threat in Libya evolves, and we’re going to continue to be prepared to take action,” Earnest said, without making any U.S. military commitment to the country that has descended into chaos since the U.S. and other Western forces helped opposition fighters topple and mortally wound dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011.
The group “is having more difficulty than they’ve had before in replenishing their ranks,” Earnest said. “But we know that ISIL is trying to establish this caliphate inside of Iraq and in Syria, and as we apply significant pressure on them there, you know, we’ll make it harder for them to capitalize on political instability in other places,” he said, using the Obama administration’s preferred acronym for the radical Sunni group.
“But right now we know that they do have that capacity; and that’s why we’re mindful of the threat that is posed by ISIL” in other countries, he said.
