Top White House Official Says US Strategy to Beat ISIS is Working; General Disagrees
By Fox News. Secretary of State John Kerry and a top White House official claimed Sunday that the U.S. strategy to defeat the Islamic State is working – despite warnings from other corners of the Obama administration that the terror network is in fact spreading.
Following the purported deaths last week of two ISIS hostages and concerns about the U.S. needing to do more, Kerry told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the U.S.-led coalition was “on the road” to defeating the Islamic extremist group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, in Iraq and Syria.
He argued that coalition forces have recaptured 22 percent of the populated areas that ISIS once held in the region “without launching what we would call a major offensive.”
The claim came just days after Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, delivered a grim assessment of the group’s evolution in testimony to the House Armed Services Committee. He described how the group was surfacing in North Africa.
“With affiliates in Algeria, Egypt, Libya, the group is beginning to assemble a growing international footprint that includes ungoverned and under governed areas,” Stewart testified. (Read more about the claims that the strategy to beat ISIS is working HERE)
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ISIS ‘Sentenced’ US Hostage to Death Last Year, Activist Says
By The Jerusalem Post. The young American hostage who Islamic State says was was killed in a Jordanian air strike was condemned to death by the militant group last year, according to an American Muslim activist.
Islamic State seized aid worker Kayla Mueller in 2013 in northern Syria and initially gave her a “life sentence” in retaliation for the jailing in Texas of a Pakistani woman whose case is a well-known cause among Islamist militants, said activist Mauri Saalakhan, who leads a US campaign to free the Pakistani.
The militant group said on Friday that Mueller, a 26-year-old from Prescott, Arizona, was killed when Jordanian fighter jets bombed a building where she was being held. Jordan expressed doubt about the claim and US authorities said they could not confirm it. (Read more from this story HERE)
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