At a rally in Florida on Wednesday, Donald Trump described President Obama as the “founder” of ISIS, going on to say the terrorist organization “is honoring President Obama.”
Really?
On Thursday on CNBC he amplified these comments, saying Hillary Clinton was the “co-founder” of ISIS.
Like so much else that Trump has said, these claims are false. The founder of ISIS is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a shadowy Iraqi cleric who President Obama is doing everything in his power to kill.
Trump has claimed he knows more about ISIS than America’s leading generals. Clearly this is also total nonsense; he doesn’t seem to have done the slightest thing to educate himself about ISIS.
In June, Gen. David Petraeus, formerly the commander of all US forces in Iraq, predicted the largest city that ISIS now holds, the Iraqi city of Mosul, could fall to US-supported Iraqi forces before President Obama leaves office in January.
Petraeus characterized this as “a very big deal” and went on to say, “no question ISIS is a loser in Iraq and, increasingly, Syria,” in an interview with me at New America’s offices in Manhattan.
The facts on the ground bear this out. ISIS has lost just under half the territory it once controlled in Iraq and around a fifth of what it had controlled in Syria.
45,000 ISIS fighters killed
Just in the past few days ISIS lost the city of Manbij, in northern Syria, a significant victory because it controls key routes to ISIS’ de facto Syrian capital, Raqqa.
On Wednesday Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, who leads the anti-ISIS campaign, said 45,000 ISIS fighters have been killed so far by the US-led coalition. “We estimate that over the past 11 months, we’ve killed about 25,000 enemy fighters. When you add that to the 20,000 estimated killed (previously), that’s 45,000 enemy (fighters) taken off the battlefield.”
That’s an astonishing amount of attrition for a force MacFarland estimates has a remaining strength of 15,000 to 30,000 fighters now.
U.S. intelligence estimates the US-led coalition has also killed at least 135 of ISIS leaders.
Meanwhile, the flow of Americans going to join ISIS or attempting to do so has slowed to a trickle from an average of six to one a month, according to US intelligence estimates.
The U.S. military has also stepped up the air campaign against ISIS’ wealth, for instance, bombing a bank in Iraq in January in which ISIS had stored millions in cash.
U.S. bombers have also repeatedly struck trucks carrying oil that ISIS has extracted from oil fields in the shrinking area it now controls, striking 83 tankers along the Syria-Iraq border as recently as Sunday.
These attacks on ISIS’ cash supply and revenue streams have had real effects on ISIS’ bottom line. ISIS has had to halve the salaries of its foot soldiers, according to documents that leaked from the terrorist army earlier this year.
Who is ultimately responsible for all the damage that has been done to ISIS? The supposed founder of ISIS, President Obama.
As to the charge that Clinton co-founded ISIS, she left the State Department in January 2013 and ISIS wasn’t founded until three months later.
As reported by CNN