Jim Garamone at the DoD News
offers the below piece:
FORT BELVOIR, Va., Oct. 25,
2017 — Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford said the meeting here of more than 70
chiefs of defense at the Counter-Violent Extremist Organization Conference was
a historic occasion.
The chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff hosted the meeting so the chiefs could chart the progress in
the struggle against violent extremists and look at ways to improve the
strategies in the long war against the terrorists.
Dunford; Brett McGurk, the president’s
special envoy for the global coalition to defeat ISIS; and Australian Army Col.
David Kelly, an exchange officer on assignment to the Joint Staff, spoke to the
press following the conference.
During the meeting, the
senior leaders from every part of the globe looked at the threats posed by
extremist groups and examined strategies and tactics to combat them, the
chairman said. The chiefs concluded “that we are dealing with a transregional
threat and it is going to require more effective collective action by nations
that are affected,” Dunford said.
Wide-Ranging Threat
He noted that in Iraq and
Syria the coalition saw more than 40,000 foreign fighters from 120 different
countries. The chairman added that figure describes the range of the threat in
a nutshell.
The chiefs spoke mostly about
the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Dunford said, because they regard ISIS as
the most virulent example of violent extremism in the world today. Still, he
added, they envision the military network that has been built to combat ISIS
will also deal with other transregional extremist threats as they arise.
The key takeaway from the
conference is that “the most effective action against these groups is local
action, but local action has to be informed by the nature of the trans-regional
aspect and so cooperation globally is important,” the chairman said. But, he
noted, global actions must be informed by local actions.
Connections
Violent extremists are
connected by three things that Dunford calls the “connective tissue” of
terrorism: foreign fighters, finances and the narrative. Cutting the
connectivity between these groups is key to defeating them, the general said.
Doing this will enable local forces to deal with the challenges posed by these
groups, he said.
One example is the five-month
battle for Marawi in the Philippines, which the chiefs were briefed about
yesterday, Dunford said. About 30 foreign fighters returned to the Mindanao
region after fighting with ISIS and persuaded local extremist groups to pledge
to ISIS and launch attacks in the city. “Small numbers of ISIS leaders are
attempting to leverage local insurgencies,” the chairman said.
The coalition is seeing
something similar in Africa, he said, where a number of local insurgencies
rebranded themselves and pledged allegiance to ISIS.
The chiefs discussed the
movement of these individuals and the need for intelligence- and
information-sharing within the coalition to stop them, Dunford said.
Global Effort, Global
Approach
McGurk helps coordinate the
whole-of-government approach to the campaign against violent extremism. He said
the chiefs spoke a great deal during the meeting about all the efforts against
ISIS, including the stabilization and humanitarian programs that are included
in every military campaign. He also said foreign fighters trying to get into or
out of Iraq and Syria has come to a near halt. “We believe we’ve cut their
revenue down to the lowest level ever,” he said.
“Most interestingly today, we
did a little walk around the globe, because it is not just about Iraq and
Syria,” McGurk said. “We had very detailed presentations of operations against
ISIS in Marawi, in the Sahel, we talked about how we are tracking foreign
fighters around the world … and we had a very good presentation from the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia about the leading efforts that they have taken on to
counter the narrative and leading the counter-messaging campaign in that part
of the world.”
The chairman said the
campaign against ISIS is at an “inflection point” and that all the chiefs
discussed what’s next. “One of the points that was made several times today is
the need for the coalition to stay focused on Iraq and Syria for an enduring
period of time,” Dunford said.
Counter-Messaging
Defeating the narrative of
the terror groups is one of the toughest nuts to crack, he said, but progress
is being made. “I’m not complacent, but I am encouraged by how the success on
the ground in translated into undermining the credibility of the narrative,” the
chairman said. “There have been some studies of young people who are
radicalized and those numbers seem to go down. There are certainly indicators
that fewer young people are being radicalized, and that’s as a result of us
being able to demonstrate what ISIS is. They can only behead so many people and
treat people they way they did in Mosul and Raqqa before those stories came
out.”
The Saudi counter-ISIS
messaging effort now has 41 nations involved. “Clearly, credible Islamic voices
are going to be the ones that matter most in countering the narrative of ISIS,
and countering it and discrediting it for what it is,” he said.
With 75 nations and entities
such as NATO and the African Union Mission in Somalia, there are some who think
the coalition is too big, Kelly said. But the coalition thrives on the
diversity of views the coalition offers, he noted.
“What I bring to the Joint
Staff, I feel, is a diversity of perspective,” the colonel said. “It’s that
diversity of perspective that we are looking for in our planning. Can [the
coalition] become too big? I don’t think so. I think the price of admission is
wanting to be a part of solving the problem.”
The coalition is not a formal
alliance, nor does any nation want it to be one, Dunford said. It all comes down
to helping local and regional forces handle their security problems, and
sharing information and intelligence to sever the connective tissue and defeat
the narrative. “The bigger the coalition is, the better,” the chairman said.
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