The ISIS group has lost most of the land it once held in Iraq and Syria but hopes to cling to scraps of a self-declared caliphate, a US official said on Thursday.
Since summer 2014, when IS was at its peak just ahead of the US-led war on the group, the jihadists have lost 65 per cent of the land they’d seized across much of northern Syria and large parts of Iraq, the US defense official said.
ISIS now is looking beyond the seemingly inevitable loss of their strongholds of Mosul in Iraq and Raqa in Syria.
“I don’t think they have given up on their vision of their caliphate yet,” the official said, noting ISIS hopes to hold on to parts of eastern Syria and western Iraq.
“They still believe they can function and are still making plans to continue to function as a pseudo-state centered in the Euphrates River valley.” In Mosul, Iraqi security forces backed by Western air power have recaptured the eastern side of the city and are making gradual progress into the western side in a bloody fight.