Pentagon expands cyberattacks against ISIS
The Pentagon is expanding its cyberattacks against the Islamic State (ISIS) group’s computer networks, senior defense officials said Monday as they claimed to have seized the momentum in the 18-month-old fight against the jihadists.
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and the U.S. military’s top officer, General Joe Dunford, told reporters the United States was determined to “accelerate” the anti-ISIS campaign and indicated cyber warfare is playing an increasingly important role in doing so.
The American-led coalition is working to disrupt ISIS’s command chain “to cause them to lose confidence in their networks,” Carter said, according to the AFP news agency.
He did not offer technical specifics on how the coalition was doing this but said the tactic was to “overload their network so that they can’t function, and do all of these things that will interrupt their ability to command and control forces there, control the population and the economy.”
ISIS is known to be actively recruiting jihadists online using social media and, in July, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch warned that the jihadist group poses a direct threat to America, with the greatest danger being the possibility that the terror group develop cyber warfare capabilities.
The American-led coalition started bombing ISIS positions in Iraq and Syria in late August 2014 but the campaign has expanded to include the training and equipping of local anti-ISIS forces, principally by Western commandos.
While ISIS maintains a firm grip on vast areas of Iraq and Syria, the jihadists have suffered some serious setbacks. In Iraq in December, coalition-supported Iraqi forces recaptured Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, west of Baghdad.
And in recent weeks in Syria, a largely Kurdish group called the Syrian Democratic Forces, again backed up by commando training and U.S.-led precision air strikes, encircled the town of Al-Shadadi in Hasakeh province, then moved in and recaptured it from the jihadists.
“Because of our strategy and our determination to accelerate our campaign, momentum is now on our side and not on ISIL’s,” Carter said, using an alternative abbreviation for ISIS.
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