isis here. reporter: isis found a safe haven. it s an area called mock moore. there s a mountain range there. isis is basically exploiting decades of regional tension in this area. on one side of the mountain up towards the top, it s controlled by the kurdish peshmerga forces. the other side of the mountain, the flat valley area is supposed to be controlled by the iraqi army. these are it s a split between their two territories. at some points along that border, there s areas as wide and deep as five miles wide where neither side patrols. isis has figured that out. now they essentially use this with freedom of movement as one of their rat lines or lines of communication, as the military would call it. they ve dug tunnels and caves. they re coming out mainly at night to roam freely. we had the opportunity while we were up at the top of this outpost yesterday to talk with the kurdish general who is in
drones have to be a part of the larger border security plan. they are a force multiplier for folks doing border protection, national guard troops have learned a lot of lessons. troops have used drone technology. is a force multiplier providing intelligence collection. we are talking about using the same methodology we used to target terrorists to figure out where these rat lines are and smuggling activities are taking place so we use drones here. the terrain is too large for individuals to focus on that alone so drone technology is able to use special sensors to view things the human eye can t see and provide analysis to determine where these illegal activities are taking place and
minimize the u.s. role in the u.n.-brokered peace talks, minimize the possibility of any success there. look, russia wants bashar assad to stay in power, because assad owes his regime to them. he will give the russians the run of the area. there was already an announcement on russian media that they re establishing permanent military bases in syria, which is something they d always wanted to keep that footprint in the middle east. so they want the u.s. out of the way. the other thing they would like to do is close tompf, because tompf is located in one of these areas that are near a lot of what they call the rat lines, the smuggling routes that go from syria to iraq that facilitate iranian proxies, russian proxies, supplies, people going in and out. tompf provides the u.s. a place where they have personnel that can gather intelligence as well as train local forces. let s take this conversation
conversations with them and disrupt these rat lines, these lines for terrorists all throughout west africa. here s the biggest two points of confusion right now. number one, what was the med evacuation like? initial reports from everyone here at the pentagon, it was two french super puma helicopters. now they re saying wait a second, it may have been private u.s. military contractors from a group called berry aviation. there are a lot of contractors that work in this part of the world. we still don t know how those wounded and dead were extracted from the battlefield. and then crucially, initial counts were that the u.s. forces did kill so many enemy. that hasn t been corroborated. they never really said how many enemy may have been killed. now there seems to be some question whether any enemy were killed. we still want to know the precise role of the french when they flew over 30 minutes in. did that flyover with 30 minutes air support, which officials here are saying is a pretty good
something bad happens, they throw that back at us and say, look, we were there constantly. you know, six months ago i was with secretary mattis, we were in jabuti, they have a big task force in somalia, all through africa, in the chad basin they have about 1,000 u.s. troops. a lot of those forces at least in niger are building a drone base. what do you need the drones for? you need for surveillance, you need to follow folks all the way from central africa up to the northern coast where they could potentially go into europe and cause even bigger problems. so the term they use for that is watching these rat lines. sometimes it s people that are being smuggled, sometimes it s goods that are being smuggled. sometimes it s used by either al qaeda or isis affiliated groups. they ve got a lot of eyes and ears over these places. and this has to do with what we call here isr, which is basically surveillance, drones, they re constantly watching this trying to disrupt this flow of goods and peopl