Believe in july, they we have the right strategy in place. On implementing the strategy. Interagency effort, across all of the departments that are involved. Secretary carter and secretary kerry have been meeting together with their senior staff to in tor and identify issues the campaign and theyre meeting foreign to focus on fighters. They are responsible for two of effort inside the strategy, denying isil safe i would like to speak the ly to those areas. Coalition has removed some of its key leaders in iraq and syria. Regained of them and partners have taken the key border town, which of isils key lines of communication and supply and pressure on its stro stronghold. When we have credible Ground Forces and support them with our air power, isil can suffer. We are working hard to build the capacity of our forces on the ground. Six trained more than brigades and provided training 13,000 personnel. We have more in the pipeline. As secretary carter said, in iraqi raining for the army has
More recently to retake tikrit as well as other successful engagements. On the political front, prime Prime Minister abadi continues to demonstrate the resolve necessary to confront isil and hes striving to manage what is a very difficult Political Landscape in baghdad. In syria, weve seen some opportunities emerge that we didnt envision a year ago, particularly in the northern part of the country where syrian kurds working with syrian arabs has successfully pressured isil along the turkish border. Over a year ago, the president outlined a whole strategy to degrade and ultimately defeat isil and he emphasized it would be a multiyear campaign. When secretary carter was here outlined a whole strategy to in july he outlined the nine lines of effort that comprise our strategy so i wont go over them in detail but i will emphasize that it will take more than the military campaign to be successful. We also need to dry up isils finances. We need to stop the flow of foreign fighters into iraq a
Typically receive from American Military personnel that remain in afghanistan. Drawing thism analogy is because it is consistent with the broader strategyerrorism that the president laid out, i believe in his west point speech, in which you said that the United States needs to develop more capability when it comes to enhancing the capacity of local forces around the world to prevent extremists and terrorists elements from establishing a toehold in their country. We have talked about how this is an important part of our relationship inside afghanistan building the capacity of Afghan National security forces. A long debate about the situation in yemen. Previously, before that country was assumed by a civil war, the United States was able to partner effectively with your many yemeni National Security forces to take strikes, or at least mitigate the risks posed by opposition forces, operating in yemen. It has been diminished because we do not have a Central Government with whom we can orde
Other efforts . A Super Committee [indiscernible] all these issues around transparency and oversight [indiscernible] and the way forward. Thank you. I do not know. I would be curious to hear what those kindss is and of programs. Is there a blueprint . I hesitate to say there is a blueprint because that sounds so concrete and fixed. There are certainly those conversations going on. They go on between the iraqi authorities and key institutional donors and Civil Society groups. And iraqi organizations. If you take the example of how do you program most effectively to stabilize areas that have recently been retaken from isis, for example. Within those conversations all are looking at this issue seriously and developing their own strategies for engagement. I think one of the kind of key messages of this research is within that conversation and within that roadmapping and blueprinting. The necessityet bignvesting equally as evidence and Civil Societys role in governments as you might invest
We can work on governance programs. We can work on poverty. We can work on education. But if violence will remain a legitimate tool at least this is how its perceived by the majority of people in the region, then whatever progress we can aim at will, as i said, be shortlived. We are trying to include this element in our interventions. We intervened, for example, in 2012 in a region between the christians and at that time what we told them in the first place is that there is a better way to address the issue of coincidin religious dates than dealing or adopting violence to solve it. And not only we told them that violence is not going to help them and to address this issue, but we also help them to find the middle ground to celebrate both christmas during the same week while avoiding or while preventing Violent Attacks from both groups. In the aftermath of the massacre, we also explained to sunni and shia tribes that resort to go violence will not advance the judicial process and that i