Analysis: Iraq and Syria must fix the problem that gave rise to ISIL in the first place — governments that pit one ethnic or sectarian group against another
WASHINGTON — In a campaign that spanned five years and two U.S. presidencies, unleashed more than 100,000 bombs and killed untold numbers of civilians, the U.S. military engineered the destruction of ISIL’s self-proclaimed empire in Iraq and Syria.ISIL is down, but it is not done.
As Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, architect of the plan for defeating ISIL in Iraq and Syria, put it in 2015, the majority of Sunnis in Iraq simply refused to fight for their government when ISIL swept across the Euphrates and took control of much of the country’s north and west. The problem now is achieving the political goal of reconciling the rival internal groups in both countries.
Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, a conservative-leaning research institute, tweeted that the remaining ISIL presence in Iraq and Syria shows that it is not defeated. “The U.S. and its partners should not view the current relative security in Baghdad as confirmation of the defeat of ISIS,” the Institute’s Brandon Wallace wrote in a recent analysis.
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