During a visit to Denmark on Tuesday, U.S Secretary of Defense James Mattis said in NATO’s fight against Daesh they have noticed the enemy in Afghanistan has lost about two thirds of its strength.
Speaking at a joint press conference with Danish Defense Minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen, after the two chaired a meeting within the coalition against Daesh, Mattis said: “In this past weekend, President (Ashraf) Ghani announced the death of the emir of ISIS Khorasan (Daesh Afghanistan), the ISIS group in Nangarhar there in eastern Afghanistan. In our anti-ISIS campaign we are dealing that group one more significant blow with the loss of their leader.
“This fight will go on, as the minister said. We continue to integrate our military and our non-military efforts. We have to remember that the battlefield that we are fighting on is also a humanitarian field where innocent people live right now, sometimes forced to stay on a battlefield by ISIS,” he said.
According to him, the troops were doing everything possible, “everything humanly possible, to limit the suffering and any casualties among those innocent people.”
He also said they were committed to working together in order to defeat Daesh and that Denmark had always been a stalwart ally of the U.S and the two nations have stood by each other in good and bad times.
Frederiksen meanwhile said that Denmark was considering sending in more soldier to Afghanistan.
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