France has now lost more people to the Islamic State than any other country in the West, but has hardly conducted any airstrikes against the terror group in Iraq and Syria since 2014.
France has lost more than 200 people between the Thursday attack in Nice, which killed 84, and the horrific attacks in Paris on November 15, which killed 130. France only carried out a paltry number of airstrikes despite pledging to bring destruction to ISIS. France’s only major operation to date was a largely symbolic bombing of ISIS’s capital in the wake of the November Paris attacks.
As of Tuesday, the U.S. led anti-ISIS coalition has carried out 13,803 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria against ISIS. The U.S. alone carried out 77 percent of these strikes with all members of the coalition compromising the remainder of the percentage.
The U.S. has spent 7.5 billion dollars on the air-war against ISIS alone, and will deploy more than 560 more troops to Iraq to aid Iraqi Security Forces in operations to retake the strategic city of Mosul from ISIS. France has less than a few hundred troops inside of Iraq and has played no role whatsoever in the ground war against the group that has slaughtered more than 200 of its citizens.
France has not played a leadership role in determining the anti-ISIS coalition strategy in Iraq and Syria, despite rhetoric to the contrary. France’s position is not atypical of U.S. allies in continental Europe. Europe faces the largest imminent threat of terrorist attacks, and has thousands of its own citizens fighting for the terrorist group in Iraq and Syria, yet has not played a major role in determining the future of the countries. These Western foreign fighters’ passports could allow them to slip back into their home country to carry out attacks, as happened in the Paris attacks.
Europe has committed limited financial resources and largely passed on the fight against ISIS to the U.S. The NATO alliance, of which the majority of Western European countries are a member, has still not joined the fight against ISIS.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter told reporters in Warsaw at the annual meeting of NATO defense ministers in June he’d “like to see NATO do more” in the fight against ISIS.
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