"Annihilation"

Secretary of Defense James Mattis said the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria ((ISIS) has "accelerated" and shifted to "annihilation tactics."

"Our strategy right now is to accelerate the campaign against ISIS. It is a threat to all civilized nations," Mattis said in an interview that aired Sunday on CBS News' "Face the Nation."

Mattis made the comments shortly after President Trump returned from his first foreign trip, where he focused on combating ISIS and terrorism in general. On his first stop in Saudi Arabia, the president called on Muslim nations to unite against terrorists and "drive them out of this Earth."

  CBS

Tough talk, and simply impossible.

"Tal Afar is now surrounded. We have got efforts underway right now to surround their self-declared caliphate capital of Raqqa. That surrounding operation is going on. And once surrounded, then we'll go in and clean them out."

[...]

"We have already shifted from attrition tactics where we shove them from one position to another in Iraq and Syria, to annihilation tactics where we surround them," Mattis said. "Our intention is that the foreign fighters do not survive the fight to return home to North Africa, to Europe, to America, to Asia, to Africa."

They have families, you effing idiot.

"It shows the effectiveness of what we're doing," Mattis continued. "However, there are larger currents, there are larger confrontations in this part of the world, and we cannot be blind to those. That is why they met in Washington under Secretary (of State) Tillerson's effort to carry out President Trump's strategy to make certain we don't just clean out this enemy and end up with a new enemy in the same area."

And just how does he plan to do that?

Mattis declined to give a timeline for the fight against ISIS, only saying that it will be "long."

Lifetimes - or eons - would have been a better answer.

"[T]his is going to be a long fight and I don't put timelines on fights."

There you go.