Commander in Coalition warns of reviving ISIS again

This came during a press conference by General Greenwich at the Pentagon. He said, "ISIS still poses a great danger and has the ability to reappear if we remove pressure from it for a long time."

General Greenwich said that the organization revealed its structural weakness through its inability to take advantage of the ongoing demonstrations in Iraq since October to demand political reforms.

He explained that, during the past months, the participants in the international alliance assessed the organization’s status after losing in March its lands of control in parts of Syria and Iraq, following battles with the coalition-backed forces that lasted for years.

The goal, he said, was to find out if the organization was "pursuing some sort of wait-and-see strategy that awaits an opportunity it can exploit, or if it is really subject to pressure and lacks capabilities."

Tensions rose between Washington and Baghdad after the assassination of the commander of the "Quds Force" militia in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Qassem Soleimani, and the deputy head of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Organization, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, described as an Iranian man in Iraq, with a US strike near Baghdad on January 3.

In an angry response to the American strike, the Iraqi parliament held a session on the fifth of January, in which it voted on the government's mandate to end the presence of foreign forces in the country, including about 5,200 American soldiers.

US President Donald Trump and his Iraqi counterpart, Barham Salih, agreed during a meeting Wednesday in Davos on the need to maintain a US military role in Iraq, as the White House stressed in a statement, without revealing any details about the framework for this cooperation.

(T/S)

ANHA