Important Stuff – Watch how the actual (non fake) news cycle from the administration rolls out in coordination with President Trump’s trip to the mid-east. There’s a larger, coordinated, geopolitical strategy message being sent to the world by the peace coalition President Trump has assembled over the past four months…

WASHINGTON DC – Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is crediting changes in tactics ordered by President Trump for increasing the pressure on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and leaving the beleaguered fighters with no avenue of escape.

“He directed a tactical shift from shoving ISIS out of safe locations in an attrition fight to surrounding the enemy in their strongholds so we can annihilate ISIS,” Mattis said Friday during a Pentagon briefing on the counter-ISIS campaign.

Mattis said that by making sure foreign fighters can’t get away, or return to their home countries, “We don’t simply transplant this problem from one place to another.”

[…] The only thing that has delayed the coming offensive, said Mattis, was the vagaries of the battlefield.

Mattis said the defeat of ISIS is a foregone conclusion.

“West Mosul, in accordance with tactics changed by President Trump, is surrounded, and our Iraqi partners are in a stiff fight,” Mattis said. “There is no escape for ISIS.” (more)