In a rather action packed interview during CNN’s State of the Union Sunday morning, host Jake Tapper grilled Secretary of State John Kerry about the extent of the ISIS threat and the government’s response. “They are shrinking … they are on the run,” Kerry claimed. But in a show of force Tapper countered hard, “Well, with all due respect, sir, I'm not sure that it looks that way to the public, that ISIS is on the run.”
When asked about the threat ISIS posed to the free world following the attack in Nice, France Kerry was adamant that what the Obama administration was doing was working:
They are not growing in their ability to do things. They are shrinking. We have taken back 40 percent, 45 percent of the territory they held in Iraq. We're squeezing town after town. We have liberated communities. We're making progress now advancing on Mosul. In Syria, likewise, they're not able to attack and hold towns. They are on the run.
In spite of Kerry’s claim that, “They are not growing in their ability to do things,” Tapper drew attention to what ISIS has been able to do. “In just the last few weeks, we have seen a series of ISIS-inspired attacks, 49 killed in Orlando, 45 killed in Istanbul at the airport, more than 200 killed in Baghdad, 84 in Nice.”
Kerry conceded that ISIS has plenty of operatives out in the world that will do what they can to harm people, but he tried to keep the focus on the battlefield in the Middle East. “But the core of ISIS is in Al-Raqqa, and it's in Manbij. It's in Syria. It's in Iraq. And we are doing everything in our power to put additional pressure them. And I believe their days are numbered,” Kerry argued.
But Tapper wouldn’t let the secretary off the hook:
You are doing everything you can do? I mean, I think there are a lot of people in the United States, in the Pentagon, in the national security apparatus who have a number of suggestions as to what more could be done to put pressure and to eliminate the threat of ISIS.
The secretary also seemed to be echoing MSNBC pundit Malcom Nance who argued on Friday that Orlando attack was not linked to ISIS. “We don't know that the guy in Orlando was fundamentally ISIS, nor even told what to do by ISIS,” Kerry said.