…..This Is What the Threat Looks Like Now
"…While territorial losses have struck at the heart of the Islamic State, the jihadi group's fighters are far from a spent force. "It would be reckless if we were just to say, well, the physical caliphate is defeated, so we can just leave now," former U.S. anti-ISIS envoy Brett McGurk told journalists shortly before he handed in his resignation on Dec. 21 in protest over the troop withdrawal.
The most recent UN estimates put the number of ISIS militants in Syria and Iraq today at between 20,000 and 30,000, with most dispersed over territory the group no longer fully controls. That's not many fewer than the 33,000 fighters U.S. intelligence officials estimated the group had at its 2015 peak, according to VOA.
Yet in terms of territory the Islamic State is much diminished. In late-2014—the year ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi declared himself caliph—the jihadi network controlled territory in Syria and Iraq the size of Great Britain. Depicted on maps, it sprawled across the Euphrates and Tigris. But the group's stronghold cities of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria fell in 2017…."
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