Tag Archives: iraq

Charts: Here’s How Much We’re Spending on the War Against ISIS

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

As the White House considers opening operating bases in Iraq and deploying troops to bolster support for Iraqi forces against ISIS, including one in ISIS-held territory, the cost of airstrikes in the region continues its steady rise.

The Department of Defense has spent more than $2.7 billion—some $9 million per day—since the United States began operations against the so-called Islamic State last August. To put that in perspective, the DOD is on pace to spend a little more than $14 million per day to combat ISIS in fiscal year 2015. That’s minuscule compared to the roughly $187 million the Defense Department is still spending on the Iraq War each day.

The result? More than 6,200 targets damaged or destroyed in the course of nine months, according to the DOD. Roughly two-thirds of that spending, or a little more than $1.8 billion, came from the Air Force, with air operations costing $5 million per day.

The newly released DOD data comes as the House passed a $579 billion defense spending bill for the coming fiscal year. Here’s the breakdown:

Source – 

Charts: Here’s How Much We’re Spending on the War Against ISIS

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Charts: Here’s How Much We’re Spending on the War Against ISIS

Tikrit is an Early Test of Iraq vs. ISIS

Mother Jones

Well, here we go:

The Iraqi military, alongside thousands of Shiite militia fighters, began a large-scale offensive on Monday to retake the city of Tikrit from the Islamic State….Monday’s attack, which officials said involved more than 30,000 fighters supported by Iraqi helicopters and jets, was the boldest effort yet to recapture Tikrit and, Iraqi officials said, the largest Iraqi offensive anywhere in the country since the Islamic State took control of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, in June. It was unclear if airstrikes from the American-led coalition, which has been bombing Islamic State positions in Iraq since August, were involved in the early stages of the offensive on Monday.

From a military perspective, capturing Tikrit is seen as an important precursor to an operation to retake Mosul, which lies farther north. Success in Tikrit could push up the timetable for a Mosul campaign, while failure would most likely mean more delays.

This is a test of whether the American training of Iraqi troops has made much difference. If it has, this latest attempt to take Tikrit might succeed. If not, it will probably fail like all the other attempts.

It’s worth noting that 30,000 troops to take Tikrit is about the equivalent of 200,000 troops to take a city the size of Mosul. So even if the Iraqi offensive is successful, it’s still not clear what it means going forward. Stay tuned.

Link: 

Tikrit is an Early Test of Iraq vs. ISIS

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Tikrit is an Early Test of Iraq vs. ISIS

Republicans and Democrats Are Both in Favor of Approval to Fight ISIS

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

So what does the public think of President Obama’s request for an authorization to use military force against ISIS? According to a new NBC/Marist poll, they’re basically in favor:

Greg Sargent has a partisan breakdown, and approval of the AUMF is surprisingly bipartisan: 60 percent of Democrats approve and 52 percent of Republicans approve. So I imagine this is going to pass before long, probably without too many major changes.

The poll has some other responses that are a bit odd. Only 45 percent of the respondents have much confidence in President Obama’s strategy, but 66 percent think we’re going to be able to defeat ISIS anyway. Is this a triumph of partisanship over actual belief, or the other way around? Or just the usual incoherence you get in practically every poll about everything?

In any case, it will be interesting to see what line Fox News and the rest of the right-wing punditocracy take on this, and whether this affects future poll results. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a much bigger partisan split on this question a couple of weeks from now.

Continue reading – 

Republicans and Democrats Are Both in Favor of Approval to Fight ISIS

Posted in FF, GE, LG, Mop, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Republicans and Democrats Are Both in Favor of Approval to Fight ISIS

ISIS Fighters Lose Kobani In Win For Obama’s Iraq Strategy

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

From the LA Times:

Kurdish fighters in the Syrian border town of Kobani appeared poised Monday to deal a decisive defeat to Islamic State militants after months of street clashes and U.S. aerial bombardment, signaling a major setback for the extremist group.

….The apparent breakthrough shows how U.S. air power, combined with a determined allied force on the ground, can successfully confront Islamic State. The military watched with surprise as Islamic State continued sending hundreds of fighters, vehicles and weapons to Kobani, which was of no critical strategic importance to the overall fight but had become something of a public relations fight.

“Essentially, they said, ‘This is where we are going to make a stand’ and flooded the region with fighters,” said Col. Edward Sholtis, a spokesman for U.S. Air Force Central Command, in charge of air operations in the battle against the Islamic State.

My expert in all things Kurdish emailed me this comment today: “This is a big deal, and it proves the viability of Obama’s strategy of working with proxies in Iraq and Syria to defeat ISIS. My prediction is we won’t hear much boasting about it from Obama though. These aren’t the politically chosen proxies.”

I’ve been one of the skeptics of Obama’s strategy, and I’ll remain so until the Iraqi military demonstrates the same fighting ability as the Kurdish peshmerga. Kobani, after all, is more a symbolic victory than anything else, and ISIS continues to control large swathes of Iraq. Nonetheless, at a minimum this shows that ISIS is hardly unbeatable, something that Iraqi forces probably needed to see.

Bottom line: this is a proof of concept. When we can do the same thing in Mosul with Iraqi forces in the lead, then I’ll be a real believer.

Original article:  

ISIS Fighters Lose Kobani In Win For Obama’s Iraq Strategy

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on ISIS Fighters Lose Kobani In Win For Obama’s Iraq Strategy

Last Year America Sent Special Ops Forces Into Almost 70% of the Countries in the World

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

In the dead of night, they swept in aboard V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. Landing in a remote region of one of the most volatile countries on the planet, they raided a village and soon found themselves in a life-or-death firefight. It was the second time in two weeks that elite US Navy SEALs had attempted to rescue American photojournalist Luke Somers. And it was the second time they failed.

On December 6, 2014, approximately 36 of America’s top commandos, heavily armed, operating with intelligence from satellites, drones, and high-tech eavesdropping, outfitted with night vision goggles, and backed up by elite Yemeni troops, went toe-to-toe with about six militants from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. When it was over, Somers was dead, along with Pierre Korkie, a South African teacher due to be set free the next day. Eight civilians were also killed by the commandos, according to local reports. Most of the militants escaped.

That blood-soaked episode was, depending on your vantage point, an ignominious end to a year that saw US Special Operations forces deployed at near record levels, or an inauspicious beginning to a new year already on track to reach similar heights, if not exceed them.

During the fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2014, US Special Operations forces (SOF) deployed to 133 countries—roughly 70% of the nations on the planet—according to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bockholt, a public affairs officer with US Special Operations Command (SOCOM). This capped a three-year span in which the country’s most elite forces were active in more than 150 different countries around the world, conducting missions ranging from kill/capture night raids to training exercises. And this year could be a record-breaker. Only a day before the failed raid that ended Luke Somers life—just 66 days into fiscal 2015—America’s most elite troops had already set foot in 105 nations, approximately 80% of 2014’s total.

Despite its massive scale and scope, this secret global war across much of the planet is unknown to most Americans. Unlike the December debacle in Yemen, the vast majority of special ops missions remain completely in the shadows, hidden from external oversight or press scrutiny. In fact, aside from modest amounts of information disclosed through highly-selective coverage by military media, official White House leaks, SEALs with something to sell, and a few cherry-picked journalists reporting on cherry-picked opportunities, much of what America’s special operators do is never subjected to meaningful examination, which only increases the chances of unforeseen blowback and catastrophic consequences.

The Golden Age

“The command is at its absolute zenith. And it is indeed a golden age for special operations.” Those were the words of Army General Joseph Votel III, a West Point graduate and Army Ranger, as he assumed command of SOCOM last August.

His rhetoric may have been high-flown, but it wasn’t hyperbole. Since September 11, 2001, US Special Operations forces have grown in every conceivable way, including their numbers, their budget, their clout in Washington, and their place in the country’s popular imagination. The command has, for example, more than doubled its personnel from about 33,000 in 2001 to nearly 70,000 today, including a jump of roughly 8,000 during the three-year tenure of recently retired SOCOM chief Admiral William McRaven.

Those numbers, impressive as they are, don’t give a full sense of the nature of the expansion and growing global reach of America’s most elite forces in these years. For that, a rundown of the acronym-ridden structure of the ever-expanding Special Operations Command is in order. The list may be mind-numbing, but there is no other way to fully grasp its scope.

Continue Reading »

Continue reading:  

Last Year America Sent Special Ops Forces Into Almost 70% of the Countries in the World

Posted in alo, FF, G & F, GE, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Last Year America Sent Special Ops Forces Into Almost 70% of the Countries in the World

Germany’s Anti-Islam Protests Play Into Extremists’ Hands

Mother Jones

For two Mondays in a row, Dresden was the scene of massive protests against the growing number of Muslims living in Germany. The first, attracting about 18,000 supporters, happened two days before the attack in Paris on Charlie Hebdo, and the second was this week. The anti-immigration protesters, who call themselves PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West), were claiming they had gathered to promote nationalism and call for the protection of German culture.

But waving German flags and brandishing posters that demanded “Homeland Protection Not Islamization,” the demonstrators in Dresden slammed asylum-seekers from Muslim regions for abusing Germany’s welcoming policies toward refugees and for tainting the culture of Germany. Dresden is home to a small percentage of foreigners, but after France, Germany hosts the largest population of Muslims in Western Europe—as many as 4.3 million, according to a 2009 estimate published in Germany’s Federal Republic.

Thousands of counterprotesters have appeared at the demonstrations staged by PEGIDA across Germany in recent months and have advocated tolerance and support for Muslim immigrants. But, prior to this week, PEGIDA supporters have easily outnumbered them; since its founding in October 2014 by Lutz Bachmann, a former petty criminal who now runs a public relations firm, the group has quickly grown in force and number. These anti-immigrant rallies have caused much debate and concern in Germany, but PEGIDA supporters may not realize that their protests have unintended consequences: Radical Islamist groups see their case against the West bolstered and legitimized by PEGIDA and other anti-Muslim protesters. PEGIDA’s actions allow radical Islamists to claim the West is hostile to Muslims—the argument used by radical groups such as ISIS to recruit disenfranchised, angry youths in search of a cause.

National security and terrorism experts point out that even though PEGIDA’s anti-Muslim events may not directly boost the recruitment efforts of ISIS and other jihadist groups, it has fueled a dynamic that undermines the fight against terrorism. “This is truly a vicious cycle,” explains Brian Forst, a professor of justice, law, and criminology at American University. “Anti-immigration sentiments aimed primarily against Muslims in the West breed alienation among Muslims, and alienation breeds extremism and acts of terror, which only aggravate anti-Muslim sentiments and behaviors…Terrorism succeeds when the victim reacts badly.”

National security experts note that PEGIDA’s public demonstrations add to a climate that can be exploited by jihadists seeking recruits. “These protests create a further sense of disenfranchisement on the part of Muslim youth,” says Arie Kruglanski, a University of Maryland psychologist and terrorism expert. “So the result is further polarization of European societies and further rift…a clash of civilizations.”

In a report for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Marc Pierini, an expert on the Middle East and Europe, described the recruitment of Europeans by ISIS: “Of the Islamic State’s European followers, many are born Muslims, while some are converts…Problems of social exclusion, religious tensions, and political frustrations provide fertile ground for recruiting of young people.” Protests like PEGIDA’s only serve to deepen the social divide, providing ISIS and other radical groups vivid images to support their causes.

A 2005 Congressional Research Service report focusing on England, France, Germany, and Spain noted that “social deprivation, discrimination, and a sense of cultural alienation may make some European Muslims—especially those of the second or third generation—more vulnerable to extremist ideologies.”

A spokesman from Germany’s embassy in Washington dismisses these concerns, however, and says PEGIDA is merely a “local phenomenon” and incapable of affecting recruitment efforts for ISIS. “Whoever is ready to join ISIS will join ISIS without a PEGIDA,” he says.

A local gang of protesters can nonetheless have international impact, observes Michael O’Hanlon, a national security expert at the Brookings Institution. “Anger and a sense of rejection can contribute to joining ISIS,” he says. “Heaven knows there have already been lots of European jihadists who have gone to Syria, tragically.”

Following the massacre of 17 people around Paris last week, PEGIDA predicted record numbers would show up Monday night to support its cause. “The Islamists, against whom PEGIDA has been warning over the last 12 weeks, showed in France today that they are not capable of (practicing) democracy but instead see violence and death as the solution,” PEGIDA declared on its Facebook page. Analysts agreed with these predictions, suggesting that the numbers of anti-Islam protesters would swell by the thousands.

The attacks do appear to have bolstered the already strong opposition to PEGIDA, as Germans refuse to let PEGIDA take advantage of the Paris tragedy to point to radicalism in all Muslim communities. According to spectators in Germany on Twitter on Saturday, including journalists and bystanders, more than 30,000 people took to the streets across Germany, from Dresden to Liepzig, to protest PEGIDA. Here are a few tweets from people who say they witnessed the actions.

Nonetheless, Monday’s PEGIDA rallies drew a record number of about 25,000 anti-Islam protesters, who took to the streets in defiance of German politicians asking them to stay home in light of the Paris massacre.

View the original here: 

Germany’s Anti-Islam Protests Play Into Extremists’ Hands

Posted in Anchor, ATTRA, FF, GE, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, Oster, Radius, solar, solar power, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Germany’s Anti-Islam Protests Play Into Extremists’ Hands

The Budget Deal Gives the Pentagon Just As Much Money As It Got During the Iraq War

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Can’t Touch This: Why nobody in D.C. messes with the Pentagon budget.

Today’s the last day for Congress to pass a budget deal and avert a government shutdown. Part of the $1.1 trillion “Cromnibus” package is the 2015 defense budget. While there’s been some wrangling over pay and benefits for service members, finalizing the Pentagon budget has been relatively uncontentious.

That’s because the Pentagon is one of the few recipients of discretionary spending that most budget-slashing tea partiers and entitlement-friendly Democrats are reluctant to touch. If the current deal passes, the Pentagon’s total funding in the 2015 fiscal year, including war-fighting costs, will come in at around $554 billion—close to what it got during the height of the Iraq War.

To be fair, the Pentagon is making do with less. Its total budget has shrunk more than 20 percent since it recently peaked in 2010. The bipartisan sequestration deal that went into effect in 2013 is supposed to keep it on a diet for the foreseeable future. However, those budget caps are looking more and more like irksome suggestions rather than requirements. Congress gave the military a partial reprieve from the caps last year, and even President Obama has spoken out against “the draconian cuts that are called for in sequestration.”

The Pentagon’s proposed 2015 base budget comes in under the spending caps; yet its 2016 budget will face tighter constraints—if lawmakers stick to them. There’s already talk that the administration’s next defense budget will exceed the caps by $60 billion. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that the Pentagon’s base budget will exceed the spending caps by more than $300 billion over the next six years.

One workaround for the budget caps is the Pentagon’s war-fighting budget, A.K.A. Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO). Since it’s not part of the base budget subject to automatic caps, some critics have described it as “an off-budget war chest slush fund.” The current defense budget before Congress authorizes more than $63 billion for overseas operations, including ongoing operations in Afghanistan, the air campaign against ISIS, and the military response to Ebola in West Africa. There is no similar safety valve for non-defense discretionary programs, whose funding has dropped 15 percent since 2010, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

And just to keep things in perspective: Even with sequestration and the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, defense spending remains close to its highest level since World War II.

View original:  

The Budget Deal Gives the Pentagon Just As Much Money As It Got During the Iraq War

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Budget Deal Gives the Pentagon Just As Much Money As It Got During the Iraq War

Bush Aide: Twitter Should Change Everything to Suit My Opinion About How to Fight ISIS

Mother Jones

A new nonprofit headed by a former homeland security adviser to George W. Bush is pushing Twitter to remove accounts associated with ISIS, the radical Islamist group that has taken over parts of Syria and Iraq. The group, dubbed the Counter Extremism Project, hopes to eliminate ISIS’s ability to use propaganda to recruit members online. “The ultimate goal is…can I put myself out of business?” says Fran Townsend, the ex-Bush aide spearheading the effort. “Can I deny them the virtual battlefield?”

Townsend is hoping Twitter execs will agree to meet with her so she can discuss her group’s goals. In the meantime, CEP’s plan is to highlight ISIS accounts and pressure Twitter to take them down. Townsend is hoping the social media giant will grant her group “trusted reporter” status. (Twitter doesn’t appear to give greater weight to complaints from anyone in particular.) Beyond that, CEP wants Twitter to develop an automated method for identifying and removing ISIS accounts. Townsend says she is sure “there are technological ways to” identify ISIS members, “YouTube, Google…they have ways to identify pornography,” she adds, but admits she doesn’t understand the issue “in a sufficiently technical way.” Twitter, she notes, might have to overhaul its rules—including its focus on anonymity—to aid in the fight against ISIS.

There’s one problem with her plan: Experts aren’t sure whether kicking ISIS off Twitter is even desirable.

This summer, a social media employee told Mashable that US officials approached the company and asked that ISIS’s bloody, violent content remain online. “U.S. intelligence prefers for these accounts to stay up, rather than come down,” the employee said. Jason Healey, a founding member of the Pentagon’s cyberwar unit, noted: “Whether or not it makes more sense to be trying to quash this kind of communication so they can’t get their message out, intel folks would always want them to have it more open.”

Deleting ISIS Twitter accounts seems central to CEP’s mission. But when I asked if she finds any value in monitoring ISIS tweeters for intelligence reasons, Townsend acknowledged the tension between monitoring and eradicating. “When I was in the government we would have this debate,” she said. “Some of them you want to follow for a bit. Then there comes a point when they become too operational…and we’re really only focused on the ones who are calling for action. With these accounts, there is no value.”

Townsend wouldn’t explain what makes an ISIS tweet “too operational”—and who should get to decide. Instead, she noted that her group wants to “provide a megaphone to other Muslim voices,” who are pushing back against radicals. (She didn’t give any examples of specific groups.) CEP also wants to reply to radical Islamists online with logical, powerful counterarguments, she added. But such an effort is already under way. In September, President Barack Obama called on the Muslim world to reject ISIS in his address to the United Nations, and the State Department’s three-year-old “Think Again Turn Away” Twitter account focuses on debating ISIS members on Twitter in real time.

Townsend’s biggest challenge, though, isn’t sorting out the best approach to containing ISIS on Twitter. It’s that Twitter doesn’t seem to be interested in her ideas. The tech company has so far refused to meet with her. That may be no surprise. “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” a Twitter official told Mother Jones in November, claiming that Twitter is not interested in waging a virtual war with ISIS.

See original article here: 

Bush Aide: Twitter Should Change Everything to Suit My Opinion About How to Fight ISIS

Posted in Anchor, Cyber, FF, G & F, GE, Jason, LAI, LG, ONA, Pines, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bush Aide: Twitter Should Change Everything to Suit My Opinion About How to Fight ISIS

Kobani Still Holding Out — But Is That Good News?

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Like Mark Thompson, I’ve been a bit out of circulation for the past couple of weeks—enough to pay only minimal attention to Iraq, anyway—and also like Thompson, I’m a little surprised to come back and discover that Kobani is still holding out against ISIS. This is largely thanks to the US bombing campaign, and Thompson isn’t sure what to think of this success:

While that’s obviously good news in the short term for the city’s 200,000 largely-Kurdish residents, it’s tougher to handicap what it means for the long-term U.S.-led effort to “degrade and destroy” ISIS.

Earlier this month, U.S. military officers were speaking of ISIS’s “momentum,” and how its string of military successes over the past year meant that quickly halting its advance would likely prove difficult if not impossible. Yet, as far as Kobani is concerned, that seems to be what is taking place.

But that raises the stakes for the U.S. and its allies. Having smothered ISIS’s momentum, an eventual ISIS victory in the battle for Kobani would be a more devastating defeat for the U.S. military than an earlier collapse of the town.

There are concerns that the focus on saving Kobani is giving ISIS free reign elsewhere in its self-declared caliphate—that the U.S., in essence, could end up winning the battle while losing the war.

“The U.S. air campaign has turned into an unfocused mess,” Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote Friday. “The U.S. has shifted limited air strike resources to focus on Syria and a militarily meaningless and isolated small Syrian Kurdish enclave at Kobani at the expense of supporting Iraqi forces in Anbar and intensifying the air campaign against other Islamic State targets in Syria.”

The flip side of this is the obvious one: have patience. “Here we are not three months into it and there are critics saying it’s falling apart; it’s failing; the strategy is not sound,” Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said Friday. “The strategy is sound and it’s working and there’s no plans to deviate it from right now.”

If we’re really engaged in a years-long battle against ISIS, then a few months here or there doesn’t matter much. And saving Kobani isn’t just a moral good, but can also demonstrate to others that ISIS is not some magical, unstoppable force destined to overrun Iraq. It’s just an ordinary group of guerrilla soldiers who can be defeated with determination and patience. Stay tuned.

View article: 

Kobani Still Holding Out — But Is That Good News?

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Kobani Still Holding Out — But Is That Good News?

7 Worst-Case Scenarios in the Battle With ISIS

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

You know the joke? You describe something obviously heading for disaster—a friend crossing Death Valley with next to no gas in his car—and then add, “What could possibly go wrong?”

Such is the Middle East today. The US is again at war there, bombing freely across Iraq and Syria, advising here, droning there, coalition-building in the region to loop in a little more firepower from a collection of recalcitrant allies, and searching desperately for some non-American boots to put on the ground.

Here, then, are seven worst-case scenarios in a part of the world where the worst case has regularly been the best that’s on offer. After all, with all that military power being brought to bear on the planet’s most volatile region, what could possibly go wrong?

1. The Kurds

The lands the Kurds generally consider their own have long been divided among Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. None of those countries wish to give up any territory to an independence-minded ethnic minority, no less find a powerful, oil-fueled Kurdish state on their borders.

Continue Reading »

Originally posted here: 

7 Worst-Case Scenarios in the Battle With ISIS

Posted in FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on 7 Worst-Case Scenarios in the Battle With ISIS