Turkey is helping the ISIS terrorist group to survive

Thanks in part to shelling from Turkey, a U.S.-backed military offensive against the last vestiges of the Islamic State has stalled in eastern Syria, The New York Times reported .

The fight against Islamic State (ISIS) has shifted, but the group is still a potent threat as it pivots from battlefield losses to directing guerrilla insurgencies across the broader region. ISIS has claimed responsibility for recent attacks in Egypt and Afghanistan and several planned attacks in Europe and Jordan.

“Although ISIS’s safe haven in Iraq and Syria has largely collapsed, its global enterprise of almost two dozen branches and networks, each numbering in the hundreds to thousands of members, remains robust,” Russell Travers, the acting head of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in Washington last month.

While the number of foreign ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria has dropped sharply, the extreme jihadist group still attracts about 100 new foreign fighters each month, and “could regain sufficient strength to mount a renewed insurgency,” the Institute for the Study of War said last month .

Meanwhile, the Syrian Democratic Forces, the U.S.-backed Kurdish-led militia fighting Islamic State, halted operations last week after Turkish troops shelled Kurdish positions further north, close to U.S. military advisers.

The U.S.-backed offensive against ISIS that was planned to be completed by December now looks like it will drag into next year. The SDF spokesman said his militia’s pause would continue until the United States and its allies “stop the Turkish hostility and remove its threat,” The New York Times said.

Source: Ahval News