U.S.-led air war "has fired more than 63,000 weapons" at IS since 2014

PanARMENIAN.Net - The number of weapons the U.S.-led air war has fired against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria since 2014 (over 63,061) is approximately twice the maximum number of fighters IS had in Iraq and Syria as of the beginning of that air war (31,500), CNSNews reports citing numbers released separately by the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Yet, if IS is denied all of the territory it once controlled in Iraq and Syria, even the Obama administration is not arguing that the terror threat it poses to Europe and the United States will end.

In fact, FBI Director James Comey warned Congress in September that the territorial defeat of IS in Iraq and Syria will cause “killers” to flow out of those nations in the hope of murdering people in Western Europe and the United States.

“The so-called caliphate will be crushed,” Comey said. “The challenge will be through the fingers of that crush are going to come hundreds of very, very dangerous people. They will not all die on the battlefield in Syria and Iraq. There will be a terrorist diaspora sometime in the next two to five years like we've never seen before.

“We must prepare ourselves and our allies, especially in Western Europe, to confront that threat,” Comey said. “Because when IS is reduced to an insurgency and those killers flow out, they will try to come to Western Europe and try to come here to kill innocent people. We have to keep our eye on it and be ready for it.”

Brett McGurk, Obama’s special envoy for the coalition fighting IS, predicted to State Department Inspector General Steve Linick in an October interview--as summarized in a subsequent IG report--“that the terrorist threat posed by IS globally could last well into the next decade, even after it is defeated in Iraq and Syria.”

“Asked about the threat IS poses, Special Presidential Envoy McGurk said the challenge to the international community was unprecedented,” said the IG report. “More than 40,000 foreign fighters have gone into Iraq and Syria—twice as many as went to Afghanistan during the 1980s—and the ease of traveling to the Middle East compared to Afghanistan, coupled with advances in global communications systems have facilitated IS’s ability to organize and carry out attacks.”