Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve continued supporting Coalition partner forces with precision strikes and coordinated fires to make further progress in the fight against ISIS in the Middle Euphrates River Valley, Syria, during the week of Dec. 23 – 29.
CJTF-OIR struck ISIS fighters, media cells, and a general service building as part of Operation Roundup, the campaign to defeat ISIS in the MERV. These precision strikes and fires further degraded ISIS’s already declining media operations. Since Sept. 2018, CJTF-OIR has conducted multiple strikes on ISIS media cells reducing their communication capabilities by approximately 45 percent.
Brig. Gen. David Doyle, the CJTF-OIR director of operations said, “The degradation of ISIS in both Iraq and Syria is directly reflected in the decline of their media operations.”
The suppression of ISIS communication capabilities, specifically their media operations, directly reduces ISIS’s ability to create propaganda.
“ISIS places an enormous emphasis on their ability to produce and distribute propaganda, which they use to recruit the vulnerable and message their followers. They claim it can be more potent than atomic bombs and it is clear to see from their recycled footage and confused narrative that we have significantly degraded the life blood of their organization. They are losing their appeal,” Doyle said.