Insurgent Groups Quotes

The Pakistani Army, the Frontier Corps, the Frontier Scouts and Police have carried out quite impressive counter-insurgency operations.

Al-Qaeda has one ideology and they go back to the same leadership in Afghanistan or in Syria or in Iraq. That's the question. You have tens of thousands of foreigners, that's definitely correct. We are fighting them on the ground and we know this.

You bomb ISIL. You're not trying to bomb innocent people. And that requires intelligence and confidence in our military to be able to develop the kinds of targets that we need. We're already doing Special Forces, who are going to help us gather that intelligence and help advise and assist and train local forces so that they can go after ISIL in areas like Raqqah and Mosul.

Since 1775, the average insurgency has lasted 7 years and since 1945 it has lasted 10 years.

Faced with the collapse of Iraq into something like Lebanon - or worse, Somalia - the Bush administration opted for a new counterinsurgency strategy. Violence was reduced because, for the first time since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Iraqis felt that there was a force capable of dominating the situation and ensuring basic order.

The goal in Afghanistan is to find the terrorists and take them out.

I never call it an insurgency. I call it terrorism.

There is no clear or meaningful difference between insurgency and civil war, or between national terrorism and civil war for that matter.

I hear a lot of talk about civil war. I'm concerned about that, of course. And I've talked to a lot of people about it. And what I've found from my talks are that the Iraqis want a unified country and that the Iraqi leadership is determined to thwart the efforts of the extremists and the radicals.

[Insurgents] pose no strategic threat to the United States or to the Coalition Forces.

Our primary threat today is ISIS. And because Hillary Clinton failed to renegotiate a status of forces agreement that would have allowed some American combat troops to remain in Iraq and secure the hard fought gains the American soldier had won by 2009, ISIS was able to be literally conjured up out of the desert, and it's overrun vast areas that the American soldier had won in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

There are many difficult challenges in Afghanistan. And we still have Taliban. We still have terrorist organizations there, and we will see violence and we will see conflict there also in the coming years,.

Syria will remain a hotbed of terrorism as long as the civil war, aided and abetted by the Iranians and the Russians, continue.

We call for, on the other hand - how do you deal with ISIS [Islamic State], of course, is the question that comes up immediately, ISIS and other terrorist groups.

With an insurgency, people are the prize. We can win every battle and still lose the war.

During the surge in Iraq, we were able to roll back the tide of al-Qaeda and associated insurgents because we succeeded in mobilizing Iraqis - especially Sunni Arabs - to join us in fighting against the largely Sunni extremist networks in their midst.

We are tangled in a very significant Islamic insurgency in Iraq.

Terrorism has essentially become a franchise in the Middle East and North Africa and increasingly in other parts of the world.

It will take time to eradicate a cancer like Isil. And any time we take military action, there are risks involved - especially to the servicemen and women who carry out these missions. But I want the American people to understand how this effort will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.

Never short of guns and guerrillas, Afghanistan has proven fertile ground for a host of insurgent groups in addition to the Taliban.

We consider ISIS and extremism to be a threat to all of us in the region. . . . Our position is that we help the legitimate governments in the region that have representation in the United Nations. We help the Iraqi government on their request through advisers; we help the Syrian government on their request to help with advisers to fight extremists. . . . So it's both lawful and legitimate.

In any insurgency there will be people who are irreconcilable and who pose a clear and present threat to the U.S. and our allies.

I just think it would be unrealistic to suggest we're going to eliminate every last domestic insurgent in Afghanistan. Certainly, the history of the country would indicate that's not a very realistic objective, and I think we have to have realistic objectives.

Coalition forces have encountered serious violence in some areas of Iraq. Our military commanders report that this violence is being insticated by three groups.

The terrorists want civil war. Al-Qaida is attacking Shiites. The Shiite militias are taking revenge on the Sunnis. And the Sunnis are become more extremist, with some joining al-Qaida.