Shocker: ISIS has regrouped and is now a “force”

quote:

---

Islamic State terrorists in Iraq have regrouped and are “now a force” once again threatening to gain control of significant territories in the country, a commander of the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga warned on Wednesday.

The Islamic State once controlled a “caliphate” that spanned through both Syria and Iraq, in which jihadists committed acts of genocide, mass murder, rape, slavery, and theft, among other atrocities. The capital of the “caliphate” — Raqqa, Syria — fell at the hands of Syrian Kurdish and American forces in 2017, eliminating the attempt at an administrative state the jihadists had created. In 2019, President Donald Trump announced to the world that the head of the organization, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had died “like a coward” in a U.S. military operation, committing suicide after being cornered and killing some of his family.

...

“Daesh [ISIS] is not in the reorganization stage anymore; Daesh is now a force, a force dangerous for the region,” Brigadier General Dler Shko Rashid of the Peshmerga told Kurdish outlet Rudaw in a report published Thursday. Rashid warned that the Islamic State terrorists were taking advantage of “security vacuums” created by tensions between the KRG and the government of Iraq. The KRG operates as an autonomous entity from Baghdad, just as the Peshmerga operates separately from the Iraqi military. The Iraqi military does not permit the Peshmerga to enter some regions on the border of the KRG and the rest of Iraq, but has also not placed security assets there, allowing ISIS to establish strongholds.

---