public access to this case. greene, who was already married, travel to syria in the summer of 2014 and not only spent time in the company of members of isis but ended up marrying an infamous isis terrorist. he is calling upon his followers to commit attacks inside europe. he says, i quote, europe is in your battleground. go and slaughter them. and shed their blood, take hostages, kill them. daniela greene was born in czech and met and married a u.s. army soldier. greene enrolled in clemson university history department seeking her master s degree. daniela was a hard-working conscientious student. reporter: this was her thesis
accomplished. and the symbolic fact of over 24 hours long this offensive is kicked isis out of an important city for them. nick paton walsh, thanks so much for your great reporting. please stay safe. congressman schiff, ranking member of the house intelligence committee, president obama said in an interview with abc news that isis has been, quote, contained in iraq and syria. contained and is not gaining strength. how can the president say that considering the fact that we see isis expanding in egypt and now maybe even in lebanon? well, i think the president was probably referring to the stalemated battlefield within iraq and syria. isis isn t really for the most part broadening its reach there. it s not capturing any major cities. you do see this dynamic where the peshmerga will capture sinjar back and yet isis in syria may capture a few small towns. frankly they were given a boost by the russians going in and bombing some of the other forces that gave them leeway. but nonetheless
between other isis controlled towns. and a big question lingering in beirut, lebanon. was it truly isis behind those brutal twin bombings killing 43 people and wounding hundreds more in a busy marketplace yesterday? we begin of course with new information on the air strike on jihadi john. cnn s jim sciutto joins me now. jim, walk us through how your sources are saying this strike went down. this appears to be a pretty remarkable intelligence operation. the u.s. had jihadi john for continuous surveillance from the air for some 36 hours following his every move on a series of stops around raqqa, syria, that is the isis stronghold, until they had what the u.s. said is confident now successful strike from a drone. and jihadi john just to be clear not just a terror face, he was an operational leader too in the words of one official a very active terrorist. you now have 72 hours reporter: he s been one of the most haunting voices and brutal killers in all of isis.
but they do still have a great deal of capability. surveillance from the air, drones, satellites, intercepted communications, we saw both of them in action here. the latest in a series of successful strikes against high value targets, you ve seen that in syria and places like yemen. again, another hard target. of course, question is what effect does this have on the operational capability of a group like isis. fascinating. jim sciutto, thank so much. joining me to discuss this all is democratic congressman adam schiff, he s the ranking member of the house intelligence committee. congressman, thanks so much for being here. let me ask you, just how confident are u.s. officials that jihadi john was in fact killed when there are not u.s. troops gathering dna and testing it out? certainly sounds like from the defense department statements that they re pretty confident. they usually won t come out this early this hard unless they have a lot of certainty. but again, that s going to be bas
movement. they are largely contained within that battlefield, but certainly outside of iraq and syria they re not the least bit contained. we see their growth in places like afghanistan. we have deep worries about libya where if we re not careful you could see isis controlling a large part of territory some time down the road. so egypt in the sinai as you point out, the bombing in beirut, they re very much growing and continue to recruit people around the world. so contained except for where they re not contained. but let s move onto the new coalition campaign, the air stkes against the isis controlled oil fields in syria. why now? why do that now? i think the administration has been wanting to take more aggressive action to go against isis finances. the challenge here is that you only have so many targets without the risk of civilian casualties. we could decimate pretty much all the oil revenues if we wanted to, but that would require not only going after these massive facilities