Islamic State taken off Iraq, Syria battlefields

“The number of fighters on the front line has diminished”.

More than two years after the US launched airstrikes against Islamic State targets in the Middle East, the commander overseeing the joint campaign said Wednesday as many as 45,000 ISIS-linked fighters had been killed.

The top fighters will train up troops from the NSA, which is largely made up of ISIS defectors or the families of tribes persecuted by the sick terror cult.

Today Britain has some 300 personnel deployed to Iraq and Syria on surveillance and advisory missions, calling in North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and allied airstrikes on ISIS positions as needed. “With the bombing campaigns, you are going to kill innocents, you are going to drive more recruits and you are going to drive more sympathy”, said Howard Gambrill Clark, a Marine veteran and former senior intelligence analyst who now heads the Washington-based Stability Institute.

The State Department has “strongly discouraged” Americans from traveling to Iraq or Syria to fight against ISIS.

Manbij is seen as key to an advance on Raqqa, the self-styled caliphate’s de facto capital, which the Arab-Kurdish alliance known as the Syrian Democratic Forces is also vowing to take.

Britain built two training in camps in Jordan a year ago and in February held a major “mission rehearsal” called exercise Channel Storm in which more than 1,600 troops from 3 UK Division took part in wargames.

Reports show that Turkey has been involved in the smuggling of oil from areas held by the Daesh terrorist group in Iraq and Syria. Nobody knows. It might be a year, two years, a day, a couple of days. They are among the 560 additional troops that President Obama approved for the Iraq mission last month. However, human rights and humanitarian aid groups insist that number is vastly underestimated. Airwars, a project tracking airstrikes targeting IS, estimates that at least 1,568 civilians have likely died in coalition actions. Another 20 percent are fighting with the Peshmerga, the Kurdish force in Iraq.

“Raqqa will resemble Manbij in many respects”, the general said.

The camps were built by the Royal Engineers and funded by the USA in co-operation with the Jordanian government whose military has been support the Coalition air war for more than 12 months.

Recruitment of anti-ISIL fighters is taking place on social media, the study found, with Facebook being the most popular online platform.

Kindi Hameed Majid, 30, fled Mosul with his wife in the summer of 2014. “I will go to Mosul and I will be afraid because they will say, here comes the Christian”, he said. Now more than two years later, he is still in Irbil and says he doubts he will ever return.