MR. BRETT MCGURK: Thank you, Mark, and General Votel.
And I just want to-- the person I want to thank--
USIP, Nancy.
I'm honored to be here, as always.
I want to give a shout-out to your team and [INAUDIBLE],,
who did really heroic work where--
there, heroic work on the ground from the bottom up
in very dangerous places, like Tikrit in the post-ISIS phase
to bring different communities together.
I mean, it really made a big difference on the ground.
And we're fortunate that that work is going to continue.
I'm also, of course, very honored
to be here with you, Steve.
You've been a mentor of mine and so many of us
here in Washington.
And of course, the privilege of serving on your National
Security Council--
I learned so much that we try to apply here today.
So let me try to just go briefly through following
on General Votel's remarks, and Administrator Green's, of kind
of where we were and then where we are.
So where we were--
I think it's useful sometimes to remind ourselves
of where we were in 2014.
So this was 2014, the summer of 2014,
shortly after Mosul fell and ISIS was approaching Baghdad.
The desperate-- how desperate that situation was,
it's really impossible to exaggerate.
We were dusting off plans to possibly evacuate our embassy.
That's how serious it was.
And how do you go from that situation
to beginning to fight back?
And we said, look, we're going to do
some things to try to have a sustainable
outcome as we take on this really daunting challenge.
First, when we say by, with, and through, we really mean it.
This is not going to be U.S. forces going in and doing
the fighting.
This will be ownership.
Principally, at that time, we're talking about the Iraqis.
And we told the--
we had a number of conversations with the Iraqis
in that very difficult summer about what it would likely
take for them to take back their country.
And they were really ready to do that.
At the time, in 2014, we did not have an Iraqi government.
There was just an election.
We had to help the Iraqis form a new government.
They did form a new government, led by Prime Minister Abadi.
I think the government's been quite effective.
But what that map doesn't show is what
was happening in those areas.
7.7 million people were living under ISIS.
Acts of genocide were going on.
Incidents like the Camp Speicher massacre--
Prime Minister Abadi was just at Tikrit--
1,500 young Iraqis just shot and murdered and put on YouTube.
So it is really impossible to overstate the desperateness
of that situation.
So we had to get the Iraqi government
ready to fight back and take ownership of their country,
stabilize their macroeconomic situation,
and form a coalition that was going to support them.
So our coalition formed in September of 2014 in Jeddah--
I think that was quite symbolic--
led by the Saudis.
We had about 12 countries to begin with.
And we now have about 75 members of our international coalition.
So we formed a coalition.
We began to work with the Iraqi government.
We have about 30 members of our coalition
militarily engaged in this fight--
trained over 100,000 Iraqis.
And I won't go through everything
that General Votel just said.
But we began to launch the campaign
to take territory back.
And if you go to the second map of where we were--
OK.
So this is where we were at the beginning of last year.
So we went through a presidential administration.
And I hope historians, when they look
at the transition from one administration to another--
we actually had a pretty smooth pretty, effective transition.
But we only had about 50% of the job done
at the beginning of last year.
And President Trump charged all of us
to accelerate the overall campaign.
And we had a strategic review led by Secretary Tillerson
and Secretary Mattis in which a number of ideas
that were in the hopper to what we could do
to accelerate the campaign.
And so we worked very hard to do that.
We also focused, again, on what we were doing
on the stabilization side.
And when Administrator Green mentions what-- stabilization,
I want to be very clear about this
because it is a ruthlessly prioritized approached.
We are focused on limited resources,
but getting people back into their homes.
So that means clearing rubble, clearing IEDs, getting
electricity and water back on--
ruthless prioritization-- and very difficult conversations
we have in Iraq and in Syria about what we can do
and what we can't do, and the emphasis also particularly
coming from the president on burden sharing.
And within our coalition and the coalition that we help lead,
we make very clear this is not a U.S.-only mission.
And when it comes to stabilization, about 3/4, 75%,
of the contributions come from the coalition.
But more importantly, in Iraq, about 80%
of the humanitarian assistance resources
come from the Iraqi government.
About 50% of the stabilization resources
come from the Iraqi government, about a billion dollars
from the Iraqi government.
So this has been a coalition led in a truly by,
with, and through approach.
So let me just go to where we are now.
So this is-- these are the gains we
made over the course of the last-- really,
the last 14 months.
So about 50% of all the gains that were made against ISIS
came the last 14 months.
And a number of changes were put in place
very early that delegated authorities to allow us to move
a little faster militarily.
But we also, very importantly, in the beginning of last year,
did two very important things.
Number one, we deployed a civilian team into Syria
to help with stabilization because if you're not
on the ground you don't have eyes on.
You don't really know what's happening.
We had to get people on the ground.
And Secretary Tillerson, working with Administrator Green
and a joint team USAID and State--
and we have about 11 people on the ground now
to work directly, hand in glove, with our military
on this ruthlessly prioritized approach to stabilization--
de-mining, removing rubble, water,
electricity-- the very basics.
And I think it has been a very effective approach thus far,
with the focus on getting people back into their homes.
And the statistics, I think, really speak for themselves.
So stabilization in Iraq, where it's a lot easier--
we're working with the government.
We have the United Nations.
It is very easy to draw international resources
for something like that.
We have an unprecedented number of people
returning to their homes in a post-conflict environment.
So 3.2 million Iraqis have returned to their homes
in areas that used to be controlled by ISIS.
This is totally off the charts historically--
takes about 10 years or so to return that amount of people
in a post-conflict environment, if ever.
And we've managed to do it in Iraq
in a very short amount of time.
I think that is testament to the success of the approach.
In Syria, it is incredibly more difficult than Iraq--
can't overstate that point enough.
We are not working with a government.
We will not work with the government in Damascus
for obvious reasons.
We have worked to get coalition contributions.
And we do have now about, in terms
of stabilization assistance--
we have only spent a total of about $100 million.
And half of that is on counter-IEDs.
And the coalition has also contributed about the same sum.
And that is going up as we speak.
Counter-IEDs-- let me just talk about what that actually means.
In Raqqa-- my first trip into Raqqa-- twice.
My first trip to Raqqa, our team showed us
that we found a cell phone from an ISIS
fighter which had the number of IEDs that were planted Raqqa.
And when you launched it on the screen,
almost every single structure in Raqqa
has an explosive device wired in the structure.
About 200 civilians returning to Raqqa have been killed by IEDs.
So why are we investing in clearing IEDs?
Because IEDs are critical to making sure people
don't get killed when they return home.
Why are we investing in the very basics like rubble removal?
Rubble removal makes sure people can return home.
You can get humanitarian aid into the city.
Electricity and water, obviously, speaks for itself.
So that prioritized focus is actually--
is returning people to their homes
at as low risk as possible.
And the people who have been killed
are people who wanted to go home even
against the advice of local authorities or us
saying, you know, it's really not safe to go back.
But people are dying to go back.
But ISIS-- they salt the earth when they lose a battle.
And they don't want anyone to return.
So the counter-IE mission is really critical.
We're training Syrians on this very dangerous work.
And they're getting the job done.
But so about-- almost 100,000 now returned to Raqqa.
There's a couple of numbers on the map, which I just
want to highlight just to help with the discussion
that we're about to have.
The number 1 and the 2 are on the Iraqi border.
That is where ISIS still remains.
And we are committed to finishing the campaign
against ISIS.
That is a notorious haven for these types
of extremist groups-- before ISIS, al-Qaeda-- in Iraq.
Again, I think we're ahead of where
we thought we would be at this time, as General Votel said.
But we're not finished.
And we have to work through some very difficult issues
as we speak.
And we're often asked, well, gee, how are you
going to finish that last part, because right now, it's
slowed down?
And I go back to the original map from 2014.
We had much more daunting challenges back then.
So we will get this job done, clearing out
those last areas of ISIS.
The number 2 on the map is Raqqa.
I already mentioned Raqqa.
Raqqa has been a real focus of our stabilization efforts.
And people are beginning to return, even
in this most difficult environment.
But the final map is--
the point on the map is 4-- is Mosul.
Mosul was probably the most challenging
humanitarian military stabilization operation
that we've seen, really, since World War
II in terms of the scale of the conflict,
in terms of the number of IDPs.
We plan-- we always plan for the worst-case scenario.
And in Mosul, we planned for--
the worst-case scenario was a million IDPs, displaced people,
coming out of Mosul.
And I remember a lot of meetings where it was, well,
that's never going to happen because if you have
a situation with even 150,000 displaced,
if you talk to the experts and USAID,
that's almost unmanageable.
But we planned for a million IDPs.
And Rob Jenkins is sitting right here,
who helped put a lot of this together, working with the UN,
working, most importantly, with the Iraqi government,
with local authorities, and with a coalition that
contributed a couple billion dollars to this--
we actually did end up having 1 million IDPs come out of Mosul
during the battle.
And every single one of them received assistance, shelter,
and aid.
So we did not have a humanitarian catastrophe
in the middle of the military campaign.
In East Mosul, and General Votel's been on the streets--
in East Mosul, the city's really come back to life.
In West Mosul, where the scale of destruction is much greater,
it's obviously going to take more time.
But a million IDPs--
and we're getting people back to their homes as soon as we can.
And Iraq is now heading into a very important period,
with elections coming up here in six weeks--
and working through-- with the Iraqi government with that.
But I just wanted to go through where
we've been to where we are now.
The scale of this challenge, I think,
has been really unprecedented.
The by, with, and through approach
is not just a bump sticker.
What that means is that local people are taking
ownership in their fight.
I think Ambassador Yasseen mentioned that in his panel
today.
The Iraqis took back their country.
The Iraqis fought and died to take back their country.
The mood in Iraq is totally different than what we used
to have four or five years ago.
It is Iraqi ownership.
And they've done an incredible job.
And so now we want to continue to support them and move
through this phase to try to consolidate some
of these gains, which will be very difficult.
But it's probably the most important piece of the puzzle.
And that's what we're here to talk about.
So thank you.