Islamic State leader ‘will taste justice,’ warns US

The terrorist group the Islamic State and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi “will taste justice” just like the late al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the US spokesman for the anti-IS coalition, dubbed Operation Inherent Resolve, said Friday.

In a briefing via teleconference from Baghdad with Pentagon reporters, Army Col. Steve Warren said coalition forces were actively searching for Islamic State leaders, especially al-Baghdadi, and that its military activities have severely hampered the terror group’s operations in Iraq and Syria.

“ISIL’s leadership is having an increasingly difficult time governing their so-called caliphate and they’re hunkered down with a degraded ability to shoot, move or communicate,” Warren said, using another acronym for the Islamic State.

“I hope that al-Baghdadi watches these press conferences because I want him to know that we are hunting him,” Warren said. “We will find him just like we found his mentor [Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi and killed him, just like we found the grandmaster of terrorism, Osama bin Laden, [and] we killed him,” Warren added.

“He will taste justice,” Warren warned. “I don’t know if that justice will look like a Hellfire missile or if it will look like a dark prison cell somewhere but he will find justice one day.”

Warren also said that the coalition-backed Iraqi security forces launched a new offensive near Mosul set to reconquer territory taken by the Islamic State in a military blitz in the summer of 2014.

The US-led coalition against the Islamic State was launched in September 2015.

Meanwhile, Washington is said to be considering ramping up its deployment of US special forces to Syria to fight the Islamic State, a US official told Reuters on Saturday.

The Obama administration was weighing this new plan in light of recent military gains against the terror group, according to the report.

The unnamed US official said that the special contingent could be many times larger than the currently 50 special troops currently in the war-torn country. A similar increase in troops was also being considered for Iraq, according to Reuters.

The US official cited in the report said that since the retaking of the strategic town of al-Shadadi in late February, a growing number of Arab tribesmen have offered to join the battle against the Islamic State.

“The additional US forces in Syria would be primarily assigned to establishing sites where they would train Arab tribesmen who have been volunteering to fight ISIS,” said the Reuters report.

The US troops, whose deployment was approved by President Barack Obama in October, have been actively assisting an Arab-Kurd coalition that includes the main Syrian Kurdish militia the People’s Protection Units (YPG), Arab groups and Syriac Christians.

The coalition has been trying to cut off access for IS to the Syrian border in order to cut off the main access route between the so-called caliphate’s capital Raqqa and the Iraqi city of Mosul, US special envoy Brett McGurk explained in November.