ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — The Islamic State (ISIS) group no longer has the ability to sustain and occupy any territory in Iraq and Syria, reiterated the spokesperson of the US-led Coalition.
"Five years ago when I was here as a coalition spokesman, 40 thousand Daesh [ISIS] fighters controlled an area of approximately 110 thousand square kilometers. They had victories in Raqqa, in Mosul, in Fallujah and Ramadi,” Spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) Wayne Marotto told Rudaw's Rozhan Abubakir on Saturday, using the militant group's Arabic acronym. “By 2019 their territorial ambitions were crushed.”
The US-led Global Coalition against ISIS’s Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR), was formally established in October 2014 by the US Department of Defense after ISIS took control of large swathes of territories in Iraq and Syria. The forces have recently handed over several military bases to the control of Iraqi security forces.
"Last month, the Iraqi counterterrorism service with support from the coalition forces carried out an operation in Anbar governorate that killed a senior Daesh financier," Marotto said, adding that they "conducted [an] airstrike in the Nineveh province completely destroying a tunnel where Daesh terrorists were hiding" just this week, in support of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF). He dismissed claims of attacks on the coalition by ISIS.
"Daesh and some outlaw groups keep on saying that they are attacking the Coalition; they're not attacking the Coalition, they're not attacking the Coalition sites because the Coalition doesn't own any sites in Iraq," he said. "They're all ISF sites, and these convoys these outlaws and Daesh say they're attacking, they're not Coalition convoys, they're Iraqi Security Forces civilian contracted convoys, and out of those convoys out of all Iraq, less than 5% are being attacked."
Last month, the US decided to shrink its troop numbers in Iraq to 3,000.
ISIS took control of large parts of Iraq in 2014. Although the Iraqi government announced the territorial defeat of ISIS in December 2017, remnants of the group have returned to earlier insurgency tactics, ambushing security forces, kidnapping and executing suspected informants, and extorting money from vulnerable rural populations.
The group has recently carried out several attacks against Iraqi and Kurdish security forces in the disputed territories, concentrating its activities in the course of the past few weeks in no man's lands in Kirkuk.
On October 19, three men were killed and set ablaze in the village of Toulk in northern Kirkuk province by suspected ISIS militants prompting locals to flee the region.
An attack earlier this month on an Iraqi police post in Hawija district, western Kirkuk province led to the killing of four policemen and the injuring of three more.
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