Tampa, Florida - 6 December 2016 1. US President Barack Obama enters stage 2. SOUNDBITE (English) Barack Obama, US President: “When ISIL (Islamic State group) made substantial gains, first in Mosul and then in other parts of the country, then suddenly Iraqis reached out once again for help. And in shaping our response, we refuse to repeat some of the 2003 invasion that helped to give rise to the organisation that became ISIL in the first place. We conditioned our help on the emergence of a new Iraqi government and prime minister that was committed to national unity, and committed to working with us. We built an international coalition of nearly 70 nations including some of Iraq’s neighbours. We surged our intelligence resources so we could better understand the enemy. Then we took the fight to ISIL in both Iraq and Syria. Not with American battalions but with local forces backed by our equipment and our advisers, and importantly, our special forces. In that campaign we have now hit ISIL with over 16 thousand air strikes. We have equipped and trained tens of thousands of partners on the ground. And today, the results are clear. ISIL has lost more than half its territory, ISIL has lost control of major population centres, its morale is plummeting, its recruitment is drying up, its commanders and external plotters are being taken out and local populations are turning against it.” ++BLACK FRAMES++ 3. SOUNDBITE (English) Barack Obama, US President: “Bottom line is, we are breaking the back of ISIL. We are taking away its safe havens and we’ve accomplished all this at a cost of ten billion dollars over two years, which is the same amount we used to spend in one month at the height of the Iraq War. So the campaign against ISIL has been relentless, it has been sustainable, it has been multilateral. It demonstrates a shift to how we’ve taken the fight to terrorists everywhere. From South Asia to the Sahal. Instead of pushing all of the burden onto American ground troops, instead of trying to mount invasions where terrorists appear, we’ve built a network of partners.” ++BLACK FRAMES++ 4. SOUNDBITE (English) Barack Obama, US President: “So, rather than offer false promises that we can eliminate terrorism by dropping more bombs or deploying more and more troops, or fencing ourselves off from the rest of the world, we have to take a long view of the terrorist threat. We have to pursue a smart strategy that can be sustained.” 5. Obama exits