Amanpour: U.S. Fight Against Islamic State ‘Not Going Well Right Now’

CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour delivered an indictment of the Obama administration’s passive response to Middle East unrest on Wednesday, quoting senior CIA sources who worry about the administration’s lack of strategy for the region. 

“I’ve spoken to former Deputy CIA Director Mike Morell, who said, ‘I don’t see a strategy,’” Amanpour said on New Day.

“One of the big attempts at a strategy was to get the Sunnis in Iraq to band together and push extremists out of the country like they did in 2007 with the Awakening and the surge,” Amanpour added. “That has not happened.”

Amanpour was asked by CNN’s Alisyn Camerota about Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken’s comment that Islamic State had lost 10,000 since the start of a coalition military campaign involving U.S. airstrikes.

Amanpour said the 10,000 figure “doesn’t really matter, because ISIS is getting thousands more recruits and thousands more acres of territory whether in Iraq or Syria. The fight that the U.S. and the West has is not going well right now.”

… 

National security analysts have questioned Blinken’s 10,000 body count figure. If true, it would indicate that the Islamic State’s estimated ranks have been “degraded by between one-third and one-half” in the last nine months. Bill Roggio speculates that the seeming disconnect between estimates of IS troop strength and casualties could indicate that IS is much larger than previously supposed.

… 

Read the full article here.