A national embarrassment. Our pussified senior officer corps strikes again. Glad they weren’t around for Desert Storm.
Pigeon pucks.
No boots on the ground limits options.
“Glad they weren’t around for Desert Storm.”
If we fought WW2 this way, you’d be reading this in Japanese or German right now.
Well it is true that they let a lot go free, but many more were killed (like 10 or 20 killed for every survivor).
They throw around the number of 100 ISIS surviving, but we will probably never know if it was less than 60, or over 500 plus 1,000 family members. I’d guess that more than 100 evacuated, with their families, and many family members of their dead. We do know that the Kurds stacked dead ISIS bodies for 2 1/2 months beforehand. The SDF claims that they had 2,300 enemy bodies from the operation.
In the end, ISIS had collected lots of hostages, many from the most prominent families in town. The Kurds and local Arabs (SDF) who did all of the fighting on the ground, often had their immediate family members among the hostages. Many of the fighters were from the town. Nobody wants to lose their parents or children on the last day of the war, if they don’t have to.
Negotiated retreats have been common when pushing ISIS out of areas - ISIS had been making an especially hard stand in Manbij, until it was absolutely untenable.