WEST PALM BEACH, United States: US President Donald Trump said on Friday that the Islamic State terrorist group has been "100 percent" defeated in Syria.
Trump made the comment as he showed reporters maps of the region -- one showing the large areas once held by the group and a second that showed the situation on Friday with no presence.
"There’s ISIS, and that’s what he have right now," he said, pointing at the two maps. Spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said "the territorial caliphate has been eliminated in Syria."
The White House declaration came after days of bombing and other attacks by Kurdish-led forces to clear the final tiny pockets of resistance by Islamic State fighters in the village of Baghouz, where they made a last stand.
US-led coalition warplanes have been supporting local ground forces in the onslaught on Baghouz that began February 9, meeting fierce resistance from the jihadists and an unexpectedly large number of civilians hunkered down alongside the fighters.
IS, as ISIS is also known, declared a "caliphate" in June 2014 after seizing a vast swathe of territory larger than Britain straddling Iraq and Syria. The loss of the Baghouz enclave would signal the demise of the "caliphate" in Syria, after its defeat in Iraq in 2017.
The terrorists still retain a shadowy presence in eastern Syria’s vast Badia desert.The Pentagon would not confirm the president's assertion about ISIS being defeated, instead referring ABC News back to the White House. Trump made the announcement while speaking to American troops in Alaska on a refueling stop on his way back from his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un Hanoi, Vietnam that failed to produce a deal.
"We just took over ... you kept hearing 90 percent, 92 percent, the caliphate in Syria. Now it is 100 percent. We just took over 100 percent caliphate. That means the area of the land. We have 100 percent," Trump said.
"We did that in a much shorter period of time then it was supposed to be," he said. "It was supposed to take -- I will not tell you what a certain general told me. But I went and met a couple of other generals. And they said how long do you think it could take, general? One week, sir. One week? I heard two years. One week, sir. Let us do it the way that we want to do it. I said: General, do it.' And if so, what happened. We had the whole thing."
Even as Trump made his comments in Alaska on Thursday, the top commander of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Mazloum Kobani, said that "in around one week we will declare complete victory over IS" referring to the Islamic State.
The SDF was preparing to launch in coming days what it hopes will be a final offensive to take back the last pocket of the ISIS caliphate. Earlier this month, in remarks before the 79-member Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, President Trump said his administration will “very soon” would be able to officially declare that ISIS was 100 percent defeated, at one point saying it could come in 24 hours.
"They'll be informing us very soon officially that it's 100 percent," Trump said in remarks at the State Department, referring to his generals.