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Article snippet: A series of events in the Middle East and Africa has stirred new questions about President Trump’s counterterrorism strategy as the U.S. focus in Iraq and Syria shifts to stabilization, and the battle against the Islamic State moves elsewhere. Taken together, the events call into question what long-term goals the United States has as it fights militants around the globe — and some critics of the administration are finding its rationale lacking. “We have no strategy,” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman MORE (R-Ariz.) said this week. The Pentagon is investigating the circumstances surrounding a deadly ambush of a U.S. patrol in Niger that left four soldiers dead. The attack put a spotlight on little-noticed counterterrorism operations in Africa, leading to questions about whether the United States has a larger strategy there. Meanwhile, government forces and militias clashed this week with Kurdish forces in the mixed Iraqi city of Kirkuk, which Kurds briefly had under their control. The fighting has prompted questions in Congress about whether the United States has planned to mitigate sectarian violence after the fall of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). And in Syria, U.S.-backed forces claimed victory in ISIS’s onetime de facto capital of Raqqa, a hard-fought win that nonetheless raises questions about the United States’s stabilization plans in a country that remains marred in civil war. The attack in Niger, in particular, has elicited heated deba... Link to the full article to read more