Annihilation 'in sight' for ISIS, Trump says

This Thursday, Oct. 19, 2017 frame grab made from drone video shows damaged buildings in Raqqa, Syria, two days after Syrian Democratic Forces said that military operations to oust the Islamic State group have ended and that their fighters have taken full control of the city.
This Thursday, Oct. 19, 2017 frame grab made from drone video shows damaged buildings in Raqqa, Syria, two days after Syrian Democratic Forces said that military operations to oust the Islamic State group have ended and that their fighters have taken full control of the city.

STERLING, Va. -- President Donald Trump says the end of the Islamic State "is in sight" after the militant group was driven out of Raqqa, its self-declared capital in Syria.

"We will soon transition into a new phase in which we will support local security forces, de-escalate violence across Syria, and advance the conditions for lasting peace, so that the terrorists cannot return to threaten our collective security again," Trump said Saturday in a statement.

He called the victory by Kurdish-led forces "a critical breakthrough in our worldwide campaign to defeat ISIS and its wicked ideology" and said "the end of the ISIS caliphate is in sight."

He said the U.S. will back diplomatic negotiations to end the violence, allow refugees to return home safely, and "yield a political transition that honors the will of the Syrian people."

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There is no indication, however, that a political transition will come any time soon.

"We have made, alongside our coalition partners, more progress against these evil terrorists in the past several months than in the past several years," Trump said in the statement, adding that Islamic State leaders "must and will face justice."

Meanwhile, Syrian government forces and their allies regained control Saturday of a predominantly Christian central town that sleeper cells of the Islamic State captured late last month.

The capture of Qaryatayn came after nearly three weeks of fighting in an offensive by Syrian government forces and Iranian-backed militiamen under the cover of Russian airstrikes.

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The Islamic State still holds parts of Syria's eastern Deir el-Zour province and Iraq's Anbar province, as well as small, scattered pockets elsewhere. The loss of Qaryatayn is another blow for the extremist group.

Qaryatayn's capture came as Syria and its strong backer Iran signed a joint memorandum of understanding for developing cooperation and coordination between the two countries' armies.

It said the memo was signed between the two countries' chiefs of staffs, adding that it provides for exchanging military expertise and intelligence and technology information in a way that can boost the two countries' capability for fighting terrorism, according to the Syrian Arab News Agency, a state agency.

Iran has been one of Syrian President Bashar Assad's strongest supporters since the country's crisis began in 2011 and has sent thousands of Iranian-backed militiamen to boost his troops against opponents.

Israel has been concerned about Iran's growing role in Syria and has been trying to keep Iran and the fighters it backs away from its border.

The Israeli army struck three artillery cannons in Syria on Saturday in retaliation for an earlier rocket barrage.

The Syrian army said in a statement that Saturday's shelling by Israeli troops came after Syrian opposition fighters fired mortar rounds that hit an open area in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, giving the Jewish state a pretext to bomb the army.

MILITANTS SCATTER

The loss of Raqqa, combined with July's victory over Islamic State fighters in its Iraq stronghold of Mosul, has reduced the terror group to a guerrilla force concentrated on the Iraq-Syria border and in smaller towns in Iraq's Anbar province.

As it cedes ground, the Islamic State may focus more on attacks in Europe and elsewhere; it has claimed responsibility for numerous deadly incidents in recent years, from the U.K. and France to Afghanistan and Tunisia. Assad along with Russia and Iran could also emerge as the major powers in Syria as the Islamic State fades there.

In an interview last week, Trump credited more aggressive rules of engagement implemented under his administration for the recent victories against the Islamic State.

"I totally changed the military. I totally changed the attitudes of the military," Trump said in an interview with Washington radio station WMAL. Asked why the Islamic State group wasn't beaten back earlier, he said, "Because you didn't have Trump as your president."

But the ouster of Islamic State forces from Raqqa and other parts of Syria has overlapped with the increased influence of Iran and Russia in the country and a stronger hand for Assad, dimming prospects even further for the type of political solution the U.S. has long wanted to see.

Most Raqqa residents fled long ago and are now scattered across refugee camps or abroad, and there is little for them to return to. The once vibrant metropolis on the Euphrates River has largely been reduced to rubble and is littered with land mines and booby traps.

So far, the Trump administration has shown little appetite for longer-term engagement or involvement in nation-building in Iraq and Syria. While it will work to clear Raqqa of mines and restore basic services like water and electricity, Washington has made it evident that it has no intention of playing the leading role in rebuilding the city.

National security officials, including CIA Director Mike Pompeo, have warned that just because the Islamic State has been evicted from Raqqa, it doesn't mean the group won't be able to carry out attacks against the United States.

The U.S. military this month estimated that 6,500 Islamic State fighters remain in eastern Syria and western Iraq, many concentrated along the Euphrates River valley straddling the border. Those fighters pose an insurgent threat in both countries and an ideological threat globally.

As for the remnants of the Islamic State group in Syria, troops have been instructed to kill them on the battlefield.

As they made their last stand in Raqqa, an estimated 300 extremists holed up in and around a sports stadium and a hospital argued among themselves about whether to surrender, according to Kurdish commanders leading the forces that closed in. The final days were brutal -- 75 coalition airstrikes in 48 hours and a flurry of desperate Islamic State car bombs that were easily spotted in the sliver of devastated landscape still under militant control.

No government publicly expressed concern about the fate of its citizens who left and joined the Islamic State fighters plotting attacks at home and abroad. In France, which has suffered repeated violence claimed by the Islamic State, Defense Minister Florence Parly was among the few to say it aloud.

"If the jihadis perish in this fight, I would say that's for the best," Parly told Europe 1 radio earlier this month.

Those were the orders, according to the U.S.

"Our mission is to make sure that any foreign fighter who is here, who joined ISIS from a foreign country and came into Syria, they will die here in Syria," said Brett McGurk, the top U.S. envoy for the anti-Islamic State coalition, in an interview with Dubai-based Al-Aan television.

"So if they're in Raqqa, they're going to die in Raqqa," he said.

No country will admit to refusing to take back citizens who joined the Islamic State, including women and their children. But few are making much of an effort to recover them.

In Iraq, hundreds of Islamic State fighters have surrendered or have been taken into custody, and their families have been rounded up into detention camps. The men are put on trial and face the death penalty if convicted of terrorism charges -- even if they are foreigners. One Russian fighter has already been hanged.

France, which routinely intervenes when citizens abroad face capital punishment, has said nothing about its jihadis in Iraq. More French joined the group, also known by its Arab acronym Daesh, than any other European country.

As the final battle in Raqqa drew to a close, Parly estimated a few hundred French fighters were still in the war zone. For Germany, about 600 men were unaccounted for.

Information for this article was contributed by Jill Colvin, Bassem Mroue, Lori Hinnant, Frank Jordans, Gregory Katz, Sarah El Deeb and Josh Lederman of The Associated Press; and by Justin Sink and Yaacov Benmeleh of Bloomberg News.

A Section on 10/22/2017

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