The lack of news footage showing Islamic State (ISIL) fighters horsing around on military vehicles proves that the US strategy against the militant group is working, a US government official claimed Monday.
State Department spokesman John Kirby said that the lack of the ostentatious displays by the insurgents demonstrated that, one year on, the US-led coalition was making progress in its campaign “to degrade and destroy ISIL.”
“A year ago they had thousands more pieces of military equipment,” Kirby told reporters, without mentioning that much of it initially belonged to the Pentagon and had been abandoned by the Iraqi army. “You were seeing CNN footage of them driving around doing wheelies on tracked vehicles,” he also said. “You’re not seeing that footage anymore and if you were it’s because it’s old stuff.”
“They aren’t driving around like that anymore,” he added, claiming that fighters have now, “taken to hiding amongst the population,“ and that “they aren’t moving in big formations the way they were.”
The spokesman’s assertions speak less to the fighting ability of ISIL, however, and primarily describe a shift in tactics.
Other areas of success cited by Kirby include the group’s diminishing threat to Baghdad and its shrinking roster of assassinated leaders.
“Nobody is saying they are down and out. We all recognize this is a long fight,” Kirby acknowledged. He claimed, though, “we are in a vastly different place a year later than we were at the outset.”
The US and its allies have conducted 5,000 airstrikes against ISIL targets since launching operations against the group last summer.
Kirby sought to back up comments made last week by the Obama administration’s special counter-ISIL envoy, retired Gen. John Allen.
Allen said that the Pentagon has seen “remarkable progress” in its mission—initially described by President Obama in September 2014 as one “to degrade and destroy” ISIL.
The public comments of government officials evaluating the war against ISIL have come under scrutiny since news broke last month that the Pentagon’s inspector general launched a probe into the politicization of defense intelligence reports.
More than 50 analysts within the Defense Intelligence Agency have come forward, internally, alleging that senior officials pressured them to whitewash negative assessments of the conflict.
The ISIL intelligence reports, which are relied upon by policymakers, including Members of Congress, depicted the US war effort in too positive of a light, the analysts claimed.
