Trump is getting the job done where obama failed: defeating ISIS

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said the intelligence community had warned President Obama about the threat from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria for “over a year.”

“This was not an Intelligence Community failure, but a failure by policy makers to confront the threat,” Rogers said in a statement Monday.

His statement comes after the president said that intelligence officers had underestimated ISIS in an interview that aired on “60 Minutes” Sunday.

“For over a year, U.S. intelligence agencies specifically warned that ISIL was taking advantage of the situation in Syria to recruit members and provoke violence that could spill into Iraq and the rest of the region,” Rogers said in a statement on Monday, using an alternate name for the group.

Rogers said his committee had formally pressed the administration to act against the terror threat in 2013.

Or maybe even earlier.

In August of 2014 obama had “no strategy yet” for ISIS and as of June 2015 still had “no complete strategy” for the inhuman ISIS. Then obama proposed a very vague three year strategy that would have ISIS defeated after he was out of office so that no blame could be attributed to him. It came about exactly as I predicted.

Obama lied to America in his campaign for re-election, 32 times claiming Al Qaeda was “decimated” and “on the run.” He also ended the war in Iraq, you know. In 2012.

Enter Donald Trump.

ISIS is now truly on the run. Raqqa, the home of the ISIS “caliphate” is about to fall.

BEIRUT — Syrian government forces and their allies on Saturday said they seized the town of Mayadeen, an Islamic State stronghold in the country’s east, in a major gain in the race for territories previously held by the militant group.

The announcement came as U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces said they were in the “final” battle for control of Raqqa, the ISIS’ de facto capital and the symbol of the group’s reign of terror. However, officials with the Kurdish-led SDF said it could be hours or days before ISIS is uprooted from the city, to the north of Mayadeen.

Over the past months, Mayadeen had become a refugee for the IS leadership from Syria and Iraq as its self-proclaimed caliphate crumbled.

The town, on the western bank of the Euphrates River, was also a major node in the race for control of the oil-rich eastern Deir el-Zour province that straddles the border with Iraq.

SDF has steadily been making a bid for areas in the province, securing territory to the east of the river as the U.S.-backed offensive focused on the Iraq border area, still controlled by ISIS.

That 72 virgin thing is not working out well:

The Islamic State group once drew recruits from near and far with promises of paradise but now bodies of jihadists lie in mass graves or at the mercy of wild dogs as its “caliphate” collapses.

Flies buzz around human remains poking through the dusty earth in the Iraqi town of Dhuluiyah, 90 kilometres (55 miles) north of Baghdad, at a hastily-dug pit containing the bodies of dozens of IS fighters killed in 2015.

“They should have ended up in the stomachs of stray dogs,” local police officer Mohammed al-Juburi told AFP.

“We buried them here not out of love but because we wanted to avoid diseases.”

At one stage, IS ruthlessly wielded power over a vast swathe of territory straddling Iraq and Syria, but a military onslaught on multiple fronts has seen its fiefdom shrink to a last few pockets.

Since the launch in 2014 of air strikes in Iraq and Syria against the group, a US-led coalition says around 80,000 jihadists have been killed.

The overall number of dead is higher if you include those targeted by Russian and Syrian strikes.

It gets better:

In agricultural Dhuluiyah on the banks of the Tigris river, residents faced a common dilemma over what to do with the corpses of IS fighters after local Sunni militiamen beat back the jihadists in fierce clashes.

“We could have thrown them into the water, but we love the river too much to pollute it,” said the local policeman, who lost his own brother in the violence.

“The people here as well as their animals drink from the Tigris.”

Local finally decided to dig a mass grave for the fighters — but they said they refused to honor them with Islamic rites.

I’ve read the accounts saying Trump’s plan is no different from obama’s plan, but it is. Trump has changed the rules of engagement for Iraq:

“Can you tell them that (the 9th Division) is receiving fire?” he told his coalition colleagues at another forward base overseeing the operation. He asked them to pinpoint where the attack was coming from using coalition aerial surveillance and take it out.