U.S. President Donald Trump signed executive action Saturday ordering the Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop a plan to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS), The Washington Times reported.
The Joint Chief will have to present Trump with the options for the destruction of the jihadist group within 30 days. Anticipating the order, military leaders reportedly have already begun to devise new strategies, the report said.
“This is the plan to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, in other words ISIS,” Trump said Saturday as he signed the document in the Oval Office. “I think it’s going to be very successful. That’s big stuff.”
The president issued the order in the form of executive action to send a message, said a senior administration official.
“Obviously that executive order will represent a profound statement on the part of the United States that we are committed to ending this atrocity,” the official told The Washington Times.
Defeating ISIS has been a top priority for Trump, who declared at his inauguration speech last week that the United States would defeat radical Islamic terrorism.
Speaking on Thursday in an interview with Fox News, the president referred to ISIS as “sneaky, dirty rats”.
"We are fighting sneaky rats right now, that are sick and demented. And we're going to win,” stressed Trump.
“We have to get rid of ISIS. We have no choice. This is evil. This is a level of evil that we haven’t seen,” he added.
The official who spoke to The Washington Times on Saturday stressed that wiping out ISIS was necessary from a national security standpoint and from a global humanitarian standpoint.
“If you think about the root causes of the humanitarian crisis in the Middle East today, obviously ISIS was a major if not predominate factor in a lot of that,” said the official. “You see the genocide of Yazidis and Christians and Kurds and many other groups.”