Did The U.S. Negotiate With The Islamic State To Leave Raqqa?

Reuters

Daniel R. DePetris, National Interest: Is America Negotiating with the Islamic State?

For local forces on the frontline, negotiated population transfers are better than launching an assault against an enemy that is well dug-in and determined to die.

On January 28, 2017, months after then-candidate Donald Trump vowed to wipe the Islamic State off the face of the earth and bomb the group into smithereens, the businessman-turned-president issued a presidential memorandum ordering Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, in consultation with other national security cabinet members, to submit to the White House a comprehensive war plan within thirty days. The president’s memo was as clear as a glass house: "It is the policy of the United States that ISIS be defeated.” It was the Pentagon’s duty to report back with a strategy that would accelerate the military campaign and bring the United States closer to that objective. While the memorandum was overshadowed a day later by Trump’s first travel ban, the January 27 executive order was nonetheless a public communication to the American people that the forty-fifth President of the United States would provide whatever resources the commanders needed to win the war.

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WNU Editor:  I am torn on this one. Nothing would make me more happy that seeing every ISIS fighter killed or captured. But I am not on the front-lines .... and who am I tell the Syrian Kurds and Arab fighters during the battle of Raqqa that they should storm ISIS strongholds at great risk to their lives and their fellow soldiers. In the end .... it was their decision to make, and they decided that it would be best to see these ISIS fighters leave and hope that they do not come back.