WASHINGTON (AP) – The United States is looking ahead toward a decisive battleground in its bid to destroy the Islamic State group, even as U.S.-backed local forces must still finish the fight for the extremists’ two main strongholds in Iraq and Syria.
The roughly 100-mile stretch of IS-controlled territory straddling the Iraq-Syria border could represent the start of an endgame for defeating an extremist group that had gobbled up large swaths of territory in the heart of the Middle East, at one point even threatening Baghdad.
Three years into America’s campaign, President Donald Trump is studying ways to accelerate the pace. He hasn’t yet announced results of a strategy review he ordered the Pentagon to undertake in late January in collaboration with the State Department and other agencies, but officials are already plotting how to wrest the final territories from IS’ control.
“ISIS will go down fighting, of course, and do enormous amounts of harm in its death throes,” Hal Brands and Peter Feaver, two U.S. defense analysts, wrote in a recent assessment of how the extremist group will be defeated.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Gen. Joseph Dunford, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, are to provide an update on the campaign at a Pentagon news conference Friday. In Europe last week for talks with coalition partners, Mattis said the extremists have lost “well over” half their territory in Iraq and Syria since 2014.