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U.S. Kills ISIS Operatives Linked to Europe Attacks
 [Daily Beest] As the self-proclaimed Islamic State trumpets its global terrorist campaign, U.S. special operations forces have quietly killed more than three dozen key ISIS operatives blamed for plotting deadly attacks in Europe and beyond.Defense officials tell The Daily Beast that U.S. special operators have killed 40 "external operations leaders, planners, and facilitators" blamed for instigating, wplotting, or funding ISIS’s attacks from Brussels and Paris to Egypt and Africa. That's less than half the overall number of ISIS targets that special operators have taken off the battlefield, one official explained, including top leaders like purported ISIS second-in-command Haji Imam, killed in March. The previously unpublished number provides a rare glimpse into the U.S. counterterrorist mission that is woven into overall coalition efforts to defeat ISIS, and which is credited with crippling ISIS efforts to recruit foreign fighters and carry out more plots like the deadly assault on Paris that killed 130 last fall. As proof of the campaign's overall success, Pentagon officials this week said the influx of foreign fighters into Iraq and Syria had dropped from up to 2,000 a month last year to just 200, and the overall size of ISIS from a high estimate of 33,000 a year ago to between 19,000 to 25,000 fighters. The U.S. strikes have picked up pace since Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced the deployment of special operations forces to northern Iraq last December, under the unwieldy moniker of "Expeditionary Targeting Force," the officials said. The spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to describe the special operations mission publicly. The officials expect that tempo to rise as the newly expanded special operations advising team inside Syria also grows from 50 to up to 300, as President Obama announced in Germany on Monday. Posted by: Besoeker 2016-04-28 |
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