Pentagon: A year into the war ISIS remains a ‘potent’ force

A year after Islamic State declared a caliphate on territory seized in Iraq and Syria, the al Qaeda splinter group faces military pressure from a U.S.-led coalition but remains a potent force holding key cities, the Pentagon said. Army Colonel Steve Warren, a Defense Department spokesman, said the militant group has lost a quarter of the land it controlled at the height of its expansion and has broken and run on several occasions in northern Syria in the face of an offensive by Kurdish-led forces.

It’s a tough fight. We said a year ago that we expected this fight to expel ISIL from Iraq to be a fight that takes years, with an ’s’. Years.

Army Colonel Steve Warren, a Defense Department spokesman said.

But Islamic State militants still control the Iraqi city of Mosul, where leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi appeared last July to declare himself the head of the new caliphate, which had been proclaimed on June 29, 2014. The group recently captured the key Sunni city of Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s vast western province of Anbar. Col. Warren noted the group was capable of mustering enough combat power to create the kind of destructive havoc seen last week in the Syrian city of Kobani, where hundreds of civilians were killed by vehicle bombs or shot. He described the Kobani attack as a “limited incursion,” noting the militants had been “beaten out of there” by local forces and U.S.-led air strikes.

ISIL has lost well over 25 percent of the territory that they held at the height of their incursion into Iraq. We have destroyed thousands of pieces of equipment. We believe that we are having impact.

Col. Warren said.