US aircraft are flying “50 to 60″ sorties a day over Iraq, from food drops to airstrikes, but their impact is local and “very temporary,” the Pentagon’s director of operations told reporters this afternoon. While Lt. Gen. William Mayville didn’t say so outright, it’s clear the majority of missions are still “intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance” (ISR) as the US struggles to figure out what’s going on in a fluidly savage situation in which the adversary is adapting nimbly to our actions.
“In the immediate areas where we’ve focused our strikes, we’ve had a very temporary effect,” said Lt. Gen. Mayville, director of the operations (J-3) for the joint staff. That has “blunted” some tactical offensives by the self-proclaimed Islamic State — aka the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), aka the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) — and it has bought “a little more time” for Yazidi refugees trapped on Mount Sinjar, he told a Pentagon press conference. ISIS forces that were moving confidently in the open have dispersed to “hide amongst the people.” Kurdish peshmerga troops have rallied and driven ISIS back from their regional capital at Erbil (Irbil). The Iraqi central government in Baghdad has even selected a new prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, without (so far) the feared coup attempt by despised ex-premier Maliki.
But the US effort hardly amounts to “breaking the momentum” of the extremists, Mayville made clear, and he fully expects them to regroup and find new weak points to attack. “They’re very well organized, very well equipped; they coordinate their operations [and] have shown the ability to attack on multiple axes,” Lt. Gen. Mayville said.
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