Pursue and annihilate.
Via Daily Mail:
ISIS terrorists pushed from one urban stronghold after another in Syria, have been moving deeper into Syria’s remote desert where they can regroup.
The Sunni militants’ self-proclaimed caliphate may have been vanquished, but experts say they are regrouping and preparing their next incarnation in the desert.
Beyond the urban and inhabited areas lies the vast Syrian Desert, also known as Badiyat al-Sham, famous for its caves and rugged mountains.
t encompasses about 500,000 square kilometers (200,000 square miles) across parts of southeastern Syria, northeastern Jordan, northern Saudi Arabia, and western Iraq.
The desolate landscape is a perfect hideout and a second home for many IS militants from the days before the birth of their caliphate.
Experts estimate that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to mount search operations – and even more to put the desert under permanent control.
Once they melt into the desert, without an army of tens of thousands of supporters from dozens of countries, ISIS jihadis will resort to guerrilla-style attacks: scattered hit-and-run attacks and suicide bombings.
‘They love fighting battles in the desert and they will go back to the old ways,’ said Omar Abu Laila, a Europe-based opposition activist originally from Syria’s eastern province of Deir el-Zour, which lies in the heart of Badiyat al-Sham.
ISIS leaders appear to have made contingency plans that involve precisely this – regrouping in the desert and launching attacks, much like IS’ predecessor, al-Qaida in Iraq, did for more than a decade after the U.S.-led 2003 invasion.
Some of those plans are already on display. In the eastern Syrian town of Mayadeen, a former IS stronghold, the militants pulled back and disappeared into the desert after only a few days of battle with Syrian government forces earlier this month.
Brett McGurk, the top U.S. envoy for the anti-IS coalition, said the Sunni militant group is now down to the last 10 percent of the territory it once held in Iraq and Syria.[…]
The group’s predecessor, al-Qaida in Iraq, was almost crushed in 2007 by U.S. and Iraqi forces. But after the Americans withdrew from Iraq in 2011, the militants regrouped, eventually emerging stronger than ever in the summer of 2014, when they conquered large areas of Syria and Iraq.