This week, the Army added three more technology executives to Detachment 201, a unit intended to bridge the gap between the commercial sector and military.
At a base in eastern Syria, a senior U.S. coalition commander said Monday that American troops who remain in Syria are redeploying to bases, including in some new locations, and working with the Kurdish-led forces to keep up the pressure on the Islamic State militants and prevent the extremists from resurging or breaking out of prisons.
A senior American diplomat has written a highly critical assessment of the Trump administration’s abrupt withdrawal of troops from northeast Syria last month, a decision that paved the way for an attack on U.S.-allied forces in the area, officials said Thursday.
Associates paint a picture of a man obsessed with his security and well-being and trying to find safety in towns and deserts in eastern Syria near the Iraqi border as the extremists' domains crumbled.
Townsend is slated to visit Somali President Mohamed Abdullah Farmaajo and Chief of Defense Brig. Gen. Odawa Yusuf Raage on Nov. 5, according to AFRICOM. He visited Djibouti on Monday.
In an eight-minute audio released by ISIS media outlet al-Furqan, ISIS confirmed the deaths of al-Baghdadi and ISIS spokesman Abu Hassan al-Muhajir. The ISIS spokesman was considered by some analysts as the next successor to al-Baghdadi.
Army Col. Myles B. Caggins III, a spokesman for the U.S.-led mission to defeat ISIS in Iraq and Syria, said the mechanized forces moving in to Deir ez-Zor province, Syria, hailed from the 30th Armored Brigade Combat team, a National Guard unit from South Carolina.
The compound — located about four miles from the Turkish border near Syria’s Idlib province — now “looks pretty much like a parking lot with large potholes."