Gen. Votel calls for vigilance as ISIS is ‘unbroken’
"The ISIS population being evacuated from the remaining vestiges of the caliphate largely remains unrepentant, unbroken, and radicalized,” US Central Command’s General Joseph Votel told the House Armed Services Committee in Washington.
ISIS is corralled into a tent camp on the shores of the Euphrates River in Deir ez-Zor province. In the past weeks, thousands of women, children, and wounded militants have evacuated the town, surrendering to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
Though they are in a pitiful state – ill and hungry – and some foreign members have declared their regret at joining the group or minimized their involvement with ISIS in their pleas to go home, others have openly declared their so-called caliphate will continue.
“The Islamic State is in our heart. Even if they kill all of us, we love it,” an ISIS wife named Um Nuh told Rudaw.
Other women vowed to raise their children to embrace the ideology of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Votel described the situation as not a surrender “but a calculated decision to preserve the safety of their families and preservation of their capabilities” while the militants wait for the right time to regroup.
"This will look very much like an insurgency. We will see low-level attacks. We'll see assassinations, we'll see IED attacks, we'll see ambush-type things as they begin to emerge from this,” he predicted.
This is already being seen in Iraq where ISIS was declared defeated in 2017. On Wednesday, six members of the Hashd al-Shaabi were killed in an ambush blamed on ISIS near Makhmour.
Votel warned US lawmakers of the need to “maintain a vigilant offensive against this now widely dispersed and disaggregated organization.”
The general’s comments come as the United States is preparing to withdraw the majority of its 2,000 forces from Syria.
Under pressure from allies worried that the departure would leave a security vacuum that could allow ISIS to reassert itself, US President Donald Trump was convinced to keep a reported 400 troops in the country. They will stay as “part of a multinational force in order to prevent ISIS resurgence and to support stability and security in northeast Syria,” Robert Palladino, deputy spokesperson for the State Department, said on Tuesday.
He declined to give details of who else would join the multinational force.