Pentagon where they are holding a News Conference live from on the to give an update operations there in the fight against isis. This morning live from the pentagon, waiting for the briefing to begin with Stephen Norton on the work of the combined joint has force Operation Inherent result. Expected to start shortly. The hill reporting u. S. Military is drafting a new emeritus for isis war. Kristina wong reporting u. S. Military seeking to craft a new narrative for the work and see Islamic State in iraq and syria in part to push back on the growing perception that president obama does not have a strategy. Also on the dods website, the u. S. Department of defense writing them instructing isis targets in syria and iraq through this operation, inherent resolve u. S. Coalition military forces continuing to attack Islamic State, including five drone strikes in syria and 12 fighter strikes in iraq recently coordinated with the government there. Good morning and happy holidays, everybody. Morning. Can you hear us . I can hear you loud and clear. Without further a do, over to you, sir. Thank you very much. Good morning. It is great to see you all again. I hope you had a nice holiday weekend. A lot of us you were able to talk to our families and some even got to see the new star wars movie. Ive had a lot of news for you this morning and i like to talk about ramadi briefly before giving it overview of the rest of the battlefield. Mapsume we have our opening up, number one. As you saw yesterday, the Iraqi Security forces have achieved inseparable success in ramadi. Considerable success in ramadi. They have raised the flag in the downtown area. The clearance of the Government Center is a significant milestone and as a result of many months of hard work. The coalition conducted more than 630 airstrikes and july with more than 150 occurring in the last months alone. We trained several of the iraqi army brigades, c. T. S. Units and police units who fought there, provided specialized Engineering Equipment to clear ieds, a floating bridge to help get, power into downtown ramadi, and partnered with the iraqis to get advice and assistance at multiple iraqi army headquarters. I would like to show you our video of the c. T. S. Raising the flag, the iraqi flag, over the anbar provincial government headquarters yesterday. Please, rolled a video. Roll that video. Do we have the video . Ok, looks like we dont have the video so i will keep pressing. The video is coming up. This falls into the awkward silence category. Ok, tom, if you could bring up the ramadi map next. The ramadi map, our heirs the isf have cleared, the unshaded areas have not yet been cleared. Now we go back to the opening map. We have several close fights ongoing that i will highlight for you today. In sinjar, star number three on your opening map, we continue to keep relentless pressure on isil. When i file lost sinjar last month, they also lost the ability to use highway 47. They were forced in are much slower secondary roads through the desert south of sinjar. On december 25 and 26th, we conducted a series of strikes on the secondary roads in order to further degrade isils ability to move fighters and supplies the between iraq and syria. Lets take a look at one of the airstrike videos so you can see what im talking about. Lets try the second video. Go ahead and roll the second video. To syria, in tashrin, star number eight to the north successfully captured the dam late saturday evening post up lets take a quick look at that area. Pull up the map. This is the first time you have seen this map, so let me quickly orient you to it. Aleppo is to the left, one. Two is at the center of the pocket that we sometimes have spoken about. The tashreen dam is number three and raqqa is in the far righthand lower of your screen. The dam is a hydro electric them that sits about 56 miles east of aleppo. Enabled by nearly 26 airstrikes over the last several days, rapidly advanced to seize the dam, which isil had held since november 2012. Losing this dam is significant because it denies isil an important majestics route between the manage pocket and raqqa. During the fourday offensive to capture the dam, they liberated more than 10 villages and 235 square kilometers. While coordinating strikes that killed over 100 enemy combatants. As i have briefly highlighted, this has been a busy week. As i mentioned before, in addition to our tactical operation, we are also striking at the head of the snake by hunting down and killing isil leaders. Over the past month, we have killed 10 leadership figures with targeted airstrikes, including several external attack planners, some of whom are linked to the paris attacks and others had designs on further attacking the west. This is a long list that i will quickly run through. Tahir,mber 7, we killed and external operations facilitator that was killed near with, syra, associated command and control as well as the handling of transferring of money and equipment. Alweis. Ecember 7, cookbookemir of province listrkuk. Iedecember 8, and isil facilitator was killed. His death will disrupt their ability to conduct ied attacks near kirkuk. December 9, the coalition killed abu jadat. Mols deputy finance emir in sul, and his death will burden them to find a replacement. December 9 also, the coalition emir insils deputy kirkuk. It disrupts their ability to train, command, and maintain fighters in the province. Syrianbasedthe been with as she does bangladeshi was killed. He was an external operations is educated as a Computer Systems engineer in the United Kingdom and he supported isils hacking efforts, their antisurveillance technology, and the weapons development. Now that he is said, isil has lost a key link between the networks. Sayid feris mohamed was in isil commander and executioner, killed near his base of operations. ,ecember 26 him a abdul hakeem another isil external operations facilitator was killed in mosu l, a veteran fighter and forgery specialist and had links to the paris attack network. He was part of isils external Operations Group who enabled attacks against western targets. His death removes an important facilitator with many connections in europe. 27, another external operations facilitator was killed near mosul. And last but not least, this is in was adline, muda syrianbased isonumber with a abaaoud. Nk to he was killed december 24 and was actively planning additional attacks against we will continue to hunt isil leaders inspireworking to attacks against the United States of america and our allies. That said, i will take your questions. Whoevers manning the shop for the associate a press, we will start with you. Thank you for doing this, steve. Can you give us a few more details on tuesday . One, do you have any Additional Details on the death of this isaiah leader who had a direct isil leader who had a direct link to the paris attackers, the one killed on the 24th . And just on ramadi, can you give onsome better granularity any casualties, the number of casualties that the iraqis suffered from any casualties on the enemy side and how many you believe may still remain in and around ramadi as they move to clear it out . Not too many Additional Details to present. He was killed in airstrike in syria, and that is really as far as we are going to go on him for now. Hopefully, as time goes on, we are able to develop some other things and will be up to get some more information out. On ramadi, tom or jeff, pull up that map. I will get it here in front of me so i can speak of it. Casualty counts are generally low. We dont have exact numbers of casualties for the Iraqi Security forces. They keep those numbers. But generally speaking, our sense is the numbers have been low, in the low double digits if that. 10, 20. But i dont have a good i dont have a good account of that. The numbers remaining. They are small. We dont have a good head count of the enemy in ramadi. But we do believe is the capability is reduced. We think less about numbers and more about what they can do. We dont think the remaining push the the oomph to Iraqi Security forces off of their positions. That said, there were several counterattacks today, small, generally take the form of baby with heavy machine gun or maybe with a heavy machine gun or rpg. We have not seen this enemy able to mass any type of combat, any type of real combat power in any ape of effort to conduct counterattack. It doesnt mean it is impossible, just means we havent seen yet. We believe the majority of the enemy has been dispersed in a smaller pockets. Many of move north and east in fact, you can see on the map this area we refer to as the euphratesn, where the river goes north and entrance quickly south. Were seeing a lot of them flow that way. Loading up families into their cars. We dont know if it was their family their own families or others. We think it was their families. They will load them up and the cars and move them into the sharks fin area. We will eventually get them rooted out of there as well. As far as downtown ramadi area, we have not seen significant combat power. I hope you will provide us with the list that you read from because i did not get all of these spellings, the names that you pronounced. Two questions about that, you mention one of the leaders was killed in an airstrike. Were any of these isil leaders will direct action on the ground i the u. S. Or other forces . Two, the broader question, every time we hear about leadership being killed, whether it is isil or the taliban or al qaeda, it is always unclear what actual effect that has on the ability of the group to operate. You know, you mention all of these killings and mentioned they were important for whatever reason, that can you quantify at all this continued erosion of the isil leadership . What will affect is that having on the ground in terms of defeating isil . Question. So all of the 10 names i read were all killed by airstrikes. I dont have the listing of what platform conducted each strike. Many of these are conducted with predators or other unmanned vehicles, but not exclusively. So i dont have the breakout, but they were all done from the air. How do these leadership strikes affect the enemy. In several them ways. First and foremost, i think any organization that sees its middle and upper management degraded in this way is going to lose some of their synergy. It is difficult to command and control and organization without a command control personnel. That leader is to facilitate the ability to your conduct activities goes down. And i think weve seen some of that on the battlefield, right . The seen the string successes begin to pile up, right . We saw takrit and sinjar, the kurdish flag pushed toward kirkuk significantly through the fall and now ramadi across the border of syria, strikes in the syria,der area of iraq, and jordan. Were seeing now the dam. Part of those successes is a charitable to the fact attri butable to they are losing their leadership. We are striking at the head of the snake. We have not severed behead of the snake yet, and it still has fangs. We have to be clear about that. Theres much more fighting to do. Theour ability to dismantle facilitation networks, our ability to dismantle the command ground and control, our ability to take away some of their enforcers, executioners, and extortionist that eats away and instills fear is away at their ability to extort money from the population, which of course, reduces their funding. So all of these various factors add up to a key militant effect. I think weve seen that affect with our successes. If i could go on for a moment, the other piece, several of these strikes were external attack planners. These are individuals who are specifically working to strike the west. They want to strike in europe. They want to strike in our very own homeland. It is important that people understand that as long as those external attack planners are operating, the United States military will hunt them and we will kill them. Steve, i wonder if you can give an estimate when ramadi will be completely cleared. The army chief was over there last week. He was told by iraqi general they expected it to be completely cleared by midjanuary. I wonder if you agree with that assessment . And also, talk a bit about the importance of u. S. Airstrikes are in ramadi. There was an iraqi officer quoted as saying 80 of the effort in ramadi was due to american airstrikes. Well, i would agree probably a to percent of the effort i would agree with that iraqi officer who said that 80 of the effort in ramadi was due to Coalition Airstrikes. I think that is a fair assessment. We dont kind of keep those numbers. It is more just instinct and feel. But i would not argue with that. The airstrikes of insignificant. We believe over the last six strikesin the over 600 which translates to over 2500 different targets that destroyed, you know, 70 truck bombs, almost 300 other enemy structures,arly 800 400 various types of weapons. This is significant. This is what really facilitated toenabled the Iraqi Forces Move in. And this is how modern warfare is, by the way. This is no different than any army should fight. Using that air power. How long will it take them to clear the rest of ramadi . Too soon to tell, tom. There are still some really there are two steps. Number one, eliminate the remaining enemy. Number two, reduce the obstacles, these ieds, the boobytraps, the entire house is that had been rigged to blow. This will take a while because any house could be rigged to blow. So as the iraqi forces are trying to dismantle these various boobytraps, they still have to be on the lookout for the remaining bands of isil fighters. It will be a process. Im not one to put a timehonored, tom, because it will be wrong. And it will take some time, i will tell you that much. [indiscernible] the u. S. Landed forces in the area of kirkuk. To confirm or deny . These reports are fantasies. I dont know where they come from, presumably, they come from individuals who want to try to drive a wedge between the u. S. Coalition and the government of iraq. It is ludicrous. If were going to put some forces somewhere, if were going to conduct a raid summer, were going to do that and complete coordination with the iraqi government. Period. My name is john heinz. Thank you, steve, for the information. I was wondering if you could comment on the willingness of the soldiers just an incorporation with a golden brigade and the iaea a little bit. I think the iraqi army is willing to fight is pretty well displayed in this ramadi map. Having seized the cap and cleared the neighborhood, having seized the Palatine Bridge and the anbar operation center, and now downtown ramadi. I think their actions because in any words that i could produce. But keep in mind, all of this is done in conjunction with this devastating air power able to deliver across this battlefield. Iraqi forces work well together. The Counterterrorist Service has been in the lead, in fact, most of these sites. The 10th Iraqi Division as the northern sector of their by the anbar. That was the 10th division. The rest was a mix of Counterterrorism Service and iraqi army conventional forces. Of there has been no issues these forces working together. On the strikes did the french, did they have any direct involvement in the strike that killed the paris facilitator . And then i have a ramadi followup. Tony, im not going to get into that little detail. The french certainly speak for themselves. I will tell you theres a Coalition Effort in everything that we do here. And i will leave it at that. What is the role of the sunni militia what has been the role . Have they been attacking or basically Holding Ground . And can you give a sense of how american training is played out in terms of what you and the army would call combined arms operation in this offensive . Important question. Theres been a lot of discussion ive seen in the news about the sunni fighters. I will take a little bit about that. We have enrolled about 8000 sunni tribal fighters in the program. Of those, we are about 5000 of them. Works, theytraining come into a training location for Iraqi Security forces provided direct training. There are overseen by american forces. Providingn forces guidance, advice, and assistance to iraqi Army Trainers who are training sunni tribal fighters. The training consists of some training in a garrison environment. The sunni tribal fighters then move over to the front line, if you will, where they cycle through the battlefield. Usually one to two weeks. They then come off the front line, returned back to the training site to finalize their what is, figure out going on on the front line. And now we have a train sunni tribal fighter who will be used holdingy as part of the stabilization forces. Theyre beginning to cycle through where there really at the planning phase now, getting these trouble fighters cycled into downtown ramadi where they ofl form sort of the bedrock the holding force in ramadi. Does that answer your question . A number of commentators have said sunni trouble fighters have gone in to basically the fight. You get a lot of commentators saying that. That is not what i get from you. Theyre basically going in after the iraqis have taken the Iraqi Military has taken the territory. Right. The sunni tribal fighters, as they cycle through small groups for short series of time, they were not a significant player in a frankly, and the seizure of ramadi. They will be Significant Players in the stabilization and the holding of ramadi, but up until now, their presence, while every man counts, every rifle matters, they have not had a large enough presence to make much of a difference. Combined arms aspect . How do you view training . Thank you for that. I think it is been very important. What weve seen, i believe, thathing of a validation training works. Some say the army l a time, and we of seen it once again on the ground. Remember, the iraqi army that we left in 2011 was an army that had been trained for counterinsurgency. That means checkpoint operations, ied reduction, that type of wor