The senior enlisted advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said today that he is impressed with the U.S. efforts in defeating the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Army Sgt. Maj. John Wayne Troxell, who was joined by the enlisted service chiefs at a Pentagon press briefing, described his visit several weeks ago to Raqqa, Syria.
“What I saw over there was our U.S. forces advising partner forces -- and we had ISIS on the run,” the sergeant major said. He pointed out that ISIS was a much larger problem in 2014, when it controlled swaths of Iraq and started moving into Syria.
“But with the strategy we have now, where we are building partner capacity -- we're training, advising, assisting and in some cases accompanying our partner forces -- we have ISIS on the run in the Middle East,” he said.
Troxell said ISIS is a “generational threat” borne out of an ideology. He said efforts by U.S. military personnel have played a “huge” role in the campaign to defeat ISIS and protect the United States.
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