Trapped ISIS fighters must choose between death and surrender

As Iraqi forces close in on the Islamic State’s final patches of territory, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has given the once-powerful terror group an ultimatum: Surrender or die.

“Daesh members have to choose between death and surrender,” Abadi said, using a derogatory term for ISIS.

ISIS has suffered severe territorial losses and bell weather defeats in the past month, as a US-led bombing campaign and US-backed and trained forces ground the group down to its last legs.

At a Department of Defence briefing on Tuesday, the top US general, Joseph Dunford, said that at ISIS’s height, “we saw as many as 40,000 foreign fighters from 120 different countries.”

At the same briefing, Brett McGurk the special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS, said the flow of foreign fighters had nearly stopped, and the group’s funding is at its “lowest level ever.”

McGurk pointed to ISIS’ own propaganda, which “about a year ago” stopped advising foreign fighters to come to Syria as the group was losing badly on the ground.

ISIS used to hold significant cities and oilfields in Iraq and Syria, but recent US-backed offensives have relegated them to a section of desert along the Iraqi-Syrian border, effectively trapping them.

Source: Business Insider