Thousands Of Islamic State Fighters Have Fled To Fight Another Day

Suspected members of Islamic State at a security screening centre in Kirkuk, Iraq, last October. Photograph: Ivor Prickett/The New York Times

New York Times: Thousands of ISIS Fighters Flee in Syria, Many to Fight Another Day

WASHINGTON — Thousands of Islamic State foreign fighters and family members have escaped the American-led military campaign in eastern Syria, according to new classified American and other Western military and intelligence assessments, a flow that threatens to tarnish American declarations that the militant group has been largely defeated.

As many of the fighters flee unfettered to the south and west through Syrian Army lines, some have gone into hiding near Damascus, the Syrian capital, and in the country’s northwest, awaiting orders sent by insurgent leaders on encrypted communications channels.

Other battle-hardened militants, some with training in chemical weapons, are defecting to Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria. Others are paying smugglers tens of thousands of dollars to spirit them across the border to Turkey, with an eventual goal of returning home to European countries.

The sobering assessments come despite a concerted effort to encircle and “annihilate” — as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis put it — Islamic State fighters in Raqqa, the group’s self-proclaimed capital, which fell in the fall, and pursue other insurgents who fled south into the Euphrates River Valley toward the border with Iraq.

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Update: Isis ‘far from finished’ as jihadi fighters regroup in Syria (Irish Times/Financial Times)

WNU Editor:  This conflict is going to go on for a very long time. On a positive note .... at least the Islamic State does not have a large and secured area/region to train, organize, and launch military operations from.