Guardian News & Media/Washington
US officials claim Islamic State extremists have lost their momentum in fighting in Iraq and Syria and have been demoralised by heavy casualties inflicted by American air strikes.
The officials say air strikes since mid-November have killed senior and mid-level leaders as well as about 1,000 fighters, particularly around the fiercely contested Kurdish town of Kobane on the Syrian-Turkish border.
The most significant IS figure to have been killed in recent strikes was identified as Haji Mutazz, also known as Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, a deputy to the movement’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. A Pentagon spokesman, Rear Admiral John Kirby, said the deaths had degraded its “command and control current operations”.
A senior US official said IS had suffered particularly high casualties as a result of its determination to capture Kobane, sending many fighters to the border town, where they could easily be targeted by US planes. As a result, the official claimed, IS fighters in the IS Syrian stronghold of Raqa were increasingly reluctant to go to Kobane and were growing disillusioned with the leadership.
“It was presenting itself as an unstoppable movement,” he said. “That kind of unstoppable momentum has been blunted, to say the least. We have killed over 1,000 of their fighters, particularly in Kobane, and that gets to Raqa because they wanted to take Kobane and had been making the biggest flag they had ever made and they were going to put it up there because to them this is a war of flags.
“They were committed to this and we could see fighters flooding in from Raqa and we saw that as an opportunity to attrit their manpower,” he said. “Fighters now don’t want to go to Kobane. There are similar accounts in Mosul, people not getting paid what they thought they’d get paid, not living the life they thought they’d promised … So the mood has changed.”
The official said it was too soon to tell whether the rate of attrition among IS fighters had stemmed the flow of militant volunteers from abroad. The US is seeking to cut the flows from the home countries of the volunteers and at the main point of transit, the Turkish border.
The US is using Turkish bases for intelligence-gathering purposes but Ankara remains reluctant to allow its bases to be used for launching bombing sorties.
However, Washington has persuaded the Turkish government to help train and equip moderate Syrian opposition groups, who would fight IS as well as the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
Turkey’s foreign minister said on Friday that the training programme for Syrian opposition groups should begin before March.
Ahrar al-Sham Islamic fighters run for cover on Friday after a fellow fighter was injured in air strikes around Al Hamidiyeh base, one of two military
