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Another issue President Trump has been addressing concerns the ISIS terrorist group. We've talked about this a lot since ISIS swept to power in 2014. Its name and its mission were the same. ISIS stands for Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, something the group wanted. And it once controlled a huge area of land in the region with a population of almost 8 million people. Not anymore. On Saturday, the Syrian Democratic Forces, a military group supported by the United States, said ISIS had been defeated in its last physical stronghold in Syria.
In a formal ceremony to mark the terrorist group's defeat, the SDF paid tribute to the thousands of forces and fighters it lost in the battle but it said it would continue to fight against any ISIS members who continued to operate and threaten the region.
BEN WEDEMAN: In 2014, ISIS had a presence from the outskirts of Baghdad to Aleppo in Western Syria at a time when it seemed that they were unstoppable, sending the armies of Iraq and other parts of Syria militias running before them. Now they have disappeared as a territorial entity. They are no more. So this is a massive, sort of, turn of events when you consider the situation just a few years ago. But I think that enthusiasm, even in this part of the world, of the region has been tempered by the realization that they still remain a threat as a terrorist insurgency.
They are still frequent attacks by ISIS sleeper cells in this part of Syria and also in many part of Iraq as well. And of course, another problem is that if the regional government here or the government in Iraq don't do a better job at reconstruction, at reviving the local economies, you could have a situation developing whereby discontent feeds into the ideology of ISIS, and you could have ISIS come back perhaps under a different name, in a different form. But it's not just the question of defeating an organization like that militarily. They have to be defeated ideologically and politically. And it’s not all together clear if that can be achieved under the current circumstances.
