LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Joint Chiefs chairman: ‘We have not contained’ ISIS.
The United States has “not contained” the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the nation’s top military officer said Tuesday, contradicting President Obama’s remarks last month about the terror group.
“We have not contained” ISIS, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told lawmakers at a House Armed Services Committee hearing.
The comment runs counter to what the president said days before ISIS launched a string of attacks across Paris.
“I don’t think they’re gaining strength. What is true is that from the start, our goal has been first to contain, and we have contained them,” Obama told ABC News.
Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communication, later said the president’s remarks applied specifically to Iraq and Syria.
Dunford said ISIS has been “tactically” contained in areas they have been since 2010 but added, “Strategically they have spread since 2010.”
His remarks were in response to questioning by Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.) on whether ISIS has been contained at any time since 2010.
Dunford added that ISIS posed a threat beyond Iraq and Syria to countries such as Egypt, Nigeria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon and Jordan.
Related: Analysis: US support for ISIS ‘unprecedented.’
Academic experts fear that American support for radical Islamism has reached “unprecedented” levels, even while it stays well below the support for the extremists seen in other countries.
Academics at George Washington University’s program on extremism found that the types of Americans drawn to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) vary widely in terms of race, age, education and family background. Yet they are largely all united by their use of social media, which ISIS has been able to master as its reach has grown.
“What we do see in the United States is an unprecedented mobilization” that is “bigger than any other mobilization we have seen since 9/11,” said Lorenzo Vidino, the director of the university’s program, said during an event releasing the report on Tuesday.
“It is not as big as some of the European countries that have been affected by the phenomenon,” he added. “But it is, in a historical sense, unprecedented.”
The findings are likely to add new urgency to officials’ concerns about ISIS, which have peaked in the weeks following attacks in Paris that killed 130 people. The Paris violence came on the heels of bombings in Beirut and the downing of a Russian airliner over the Sinai Peninsula, a troubling sign of ISIS’s expansion beyond its self-proclaimed caliphate.
Intelligence and law enforcement officials have repeatedly warned that ISIS’s fluency on the Internet has made it attractive to disaffected Americans who grow radicalized online.
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