ISIS terrorists forced American journalist Steven Sotloff to read a statement before his apparent beheading that implies the jihadists won the Iraq War.

“You’ve spent billions of U.S. taxpayers’ dollars and we’ve lost thousands of our troops in our previous fighting against the Islamic State, so where is the people’s interest in reigniting this war?” Sotloff says in the video, per a transcript released by SITE Intelligence Group.


The logic of that statement suggests that the terrorists, or at least terrorist propagandists, rejects the conventional narrative of the Iraq war as something that began, had a middle, and then was “ended” by President Obama.

ISIS made Sotloff speak as if there was one lengthy conflict that ended in the defeat of U.S. troops, when they withdrew from the country in 2011.