resilient organization. they were around for over a decade. they had been defeated around 2010, 2011 when the u.s. withdrew from iraq and then came back with a bullet as this so-called caliphate. i ve been following a group that wages these attacks mostly in syria and iraq. the deadliest terror attack that they waged outside of the calorca calorca caliphate was sir lanka. they are looking to do prison breaks, looking for free their veteran jihadists from the detention facilities. especially the ones from the
about syria. that doesn t change simply because their leader has been taken off the battlefield. so much of your research has centered on what isis have brought in this region. yes, the caliphate is gone. isis lives on. i know you talked to isis fighters. you looked into what happened next as an institution. help us understand that. there is this fear, as i understand it, legitimate fear there have been prison breaks. they are back on the battlefield. how worried should national security experts be about that? this really is a product of having on-the-ground information. when you talk to folks who have been living this war the last five years, both on the u.s. side and the syrian side, they will say to you it s that partnership between the u.s. and the u.s.-backed forces on the ground, in communities that really allowed them to back isis into a corner and finally force them earlier this year to give up their territorial hold on syria. now you have this moment where everybody is say
donald trump conflated himself with troops on the ground. i don t know if you notice. again and again he said i m the one who personally destroyed isis, using this pronoun over and over again. it s really odd almost. what that means for the united states is trump has taken ownership over whatever happens next. and i think he was warned there were consequences of unleashing potentially a new way of dangerous tariffs and possibility of prison breaks and his own defense secretary has said that at least 100 isis prisoners have escaped as a result of this turkish military incursion. donald trump doesn t seem to reckon with the consequences and the fact that people will blame him if isis comes back. which many people fear is a consequence of the hasty decision. he seems convinced this is a political win for him. he s is facing bipartisan backlash. in the same poll that i just read it shows that 50% of americans disapprove of his decisions to pull troops from
possibility of prison breaks and defense secretary has said that at least 100 isis prisoners have escaped as a result of this turkish military incursion. trump doesn t seem to reckon with the consequences people will blame him if isis comes back. which many people fear is a consequence of the hasty decision. he seems convinced this is a political win. he s is facing bipartisan backlash. in the same poll that i just read it shows that 50% of americans disapprove of the decisions to pull troops from syria. and 75% say they are concerned about the situation. is this the win he thinks it is? we were talking about this. we were talking about trumps recent self-owns. he claims these are perfect phone calls but releases a transcript with president zelensky. that has him dead to rights if quid pro quo.
as if to say we knew there was going to be prison breaks. but it five times the terrorists that pulled off 9/11. but we wereening maing it well. we had a handful of soldiers with the kurds and others. what the president has done is lit a fuse that will make this war, it will cause it to escalate overtime and extend it. this is a policy that will achieve the direct opposite outcome of what it pretends to have been motivated by. but i think what we really have to deal with at core here is we have a president who has built his presidency on just wins in terms of public perception and optics rather than dealing with basic things like human life. i mean, we re playing with whether or not terrorists can break out or not and we re arguing about, well, a hundred broke out rather than two hundred. we re talking about terrorists. we re talking about people that will kill people.