Posted on 06/30/2017 5:56:59 PM PDT by marshmallow
After eight months of grinding urban warfare, Iraqi government troops on Thursday captured the ruined mosque at the heart of Islamic State's de facto capital Mosul, and the prime minister declared the group's self-styled caliphate at an end.
Iraqi authorities expect the long battle for Mosul to end in coming days as remaining Islamic State fighters are bottled up in just a handful of neighborhoods of the Old City.
The seizure of the nearly 850-year-old Grand al-Nuri Mosque -- from where Islamic State proclaimed the caliphate nearly three years ago to the day -- is a huge symbolic victory.
"The return of al-Nuri Mosque and al-Hadba minaret to the fold of the nation marks the end of the Daesh state of falsehood," Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said in a statement, referring to the hardline Sunni Mulsim group by an Arabic acronym.
The fall of Mosul would in effect mark the end of the Iraqi half of the IS caliphate, although the group still controls territory west and south of the city, ruling over hundreds of thousands of people.
Its stronghold in Syria, Raqqa, is also close to falling.
A U.S.-backed Kurdish-led coalition besieging Raqqa on Thursday fully encircled it after closing the militants' last way out from the south, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Took what? Six months of Trump?
Took what? Six months of Trump?
This is NOT over until MATTIS says it’s OVER!!!
Awesome
Prisoners? How do you send them back to their mommas?
If your talking about dead ISIS, in a pine box...
Six more months of Trump, and ISIS will be a JV outfit again.
***If your talking about dead ISIS, in a pine box...***
Sewn up in a pig skin works better.
That’s nice to be so positive. ISIS is a form of cancer that spreads when removed. Also, this dream of a caliphate may have been popped but not Turkey’s.
‘We’ll fight whoever we have to’, say Syria’s Kurdish female fighters
Why send them back just bury them in a mass grave in some remote place with a marker saying, “here lies the damned.”
and Mattis has always said:
“no war is over until the enemy says it’s over. We may think it over, we may declare it over, but in fact, the enemy gets a vote”
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