Enough of this pessimism. Let’s focus on Greenland, or Disneyland
Al-Qaeda is dead and buried. ISIS is soundly defeated. Iran is on the run, under intense pressure. Or maybe not.
In what Charles Lister, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, calls a “deeply negative” quarterly strategic assessment by the US Department of Defense (DOD), it reported that
ISIS continued its transition from a territory-holding force to an insurgency in Syria and solidified insurgent capabilities in Iraq… ISIS carried out assassinations, suicide attacks, abductions, and arson of crops in both Iraq and Syria. In addition, ISIS established “resurgent cells” in Syria and sought to expand its command and control nodes in Iraq.
Lister says “the DOD was also clear in diagnosing why the ISIS threat remains and why the future prognosis is so concerning: The US has halved its troop numbers in 2019, in line with a presidential directive ordering a partial withdrawal from Syria. At the most pivotal moment in the counter-ISIS campaign, when ISIS had its nose pressed to the wall, the US gave it breathing room.”
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