Despite pledges from the Obama administration to “accelerate” the war against the Islamic State and a top envoy claiming “this perverse caliphate is shrinking,” the Pentagon admitted Monday it had retaken only 5 percent of ISIS-held territory in Iraq in the past five months.
(FOX)- President Obama announced at the Pentagon in December that 40 percent of ISIS-held territory in Iraq had been recaptured by Iraqi security forces backed by thousands of airstrikes from the U.S.-led coalition, a number officials repeated for five months.
But on Monday, Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said 45 percent of ISIS territory had been taken back in Iraq, or a modest 5 percentage-point gain from December.
Cook said 16-20 percent of ISIS-held territory had been taken from ISIS in Syria, a similar estimate given in January.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said last week that it was unlikely ISIS would be pushed out of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, during the Obama administration.
Despite the modest gains against ISIS, Cook said Secretary of Defense Ash Carter was “satisfied” with the pace of operations. When asked why the hundreds of additional forces announced by Carter last month were not on the ground in Iraq, Cook said, “We always anticipated there would be some sort of lag time between decisions and ultimately implementation.”
Speaking earlier Monday from Amman, Jordan, the president’s envoy in the ISIS fight, Brett McGurk, said “this perverse caliphate is shrinking.”
In recent months, the U.S. military reported it had destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars in ISIS cash and robbed the group of 50 percent of its oil revenue.