Editor's Note: (Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of "United States of Jihad: Investigating America's Homegrown Terrorists.")
(CNN) At a rally in Florida on Wednesday, Donald Trump described President Obama as the "founder" of ISIS, going on to say the terrorist organization "is honoring President Obama."
Really?
On Thursday on CNBC he amplified these comments, saying Hillary Clinton was the "co-founder" of ISIS.
Like so much else that Trump has said, these claims are false. The founder of ISIS is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a shadowy Iraqi cleric who President Obama is doing everything in his power to kill.
Trump has claimed he knows more about ISIS than America's leading generals. Clearly this is also total nonsense; he doesn't seem to have done the slightest thing to educate himself about ISIS.
In June, Gen. David Petraeus, formerly the commander of all US forces in Iraq, predicted the largest city that ISIS now holds, the Iraqi city of Mosul, could fall to US-supported Iraqi forces before President Obama leaves office in January.
Petraeus characterized this as "a very big deal" and went on to say, "no question ISIS is a loser in Iraq and, increasingly, Syria," in an interview with me at New America's offices in Manhattan.
The facts on the ground bear this out. ISIS has lost just under half the territory it once controlled in Iraq and around a fifth of what it had controlled in Syria.
45,000 ISIS fighters killed
Just in the past few days ISIS lost the city of Manbij, in northern Syria, a significant victory because it controls key routes to ISIS' de facto Syrian capital, Raqqa.
On Wednesday Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, who leads the anti-ISIS campaign, said 45,000 ISIS fighters have been killed so far by the US-led coalition. "We estimate that over the past 11 months, we've killed about 25,000 enemy fighters. When you add that to the 20,000 estimated killed (previously), that's 45,000 enemy (fighters) taken off the battlefield."
That's an astonishing amount of attrition for a force MacFarland estimates has a remaining strength of 15,000 to 30,000 fighters now.
U.S. intelligence estimates the US-led coalition has also killed at least 135 of ISIS leaders.
Meanwhile, the flow of Americans going to join ISIS or attempting to do so has slowed to a trickle from an average of six to one a month, according to US intelligence estimates.
The U.S. military has also stepped up the air campaign against ISIS' wealth, for instance, bombing a bank in Iraq in January in which ISIS had stored millions in cash.
U.S. bombers have also repeatedly struck trucks carrying oil that ISIS has extracted from oil fields in the shrinking area it now controls, striking 83 tankers along the Syria-Iraq border as recently as Sunday.
The ISIS terror threat
People flee the scene of a terror attack at Istanbul's Ataturk airport on June 29. Turkish officials have strong evidence that ISIS leadership was involved in the planning of the attack, a senior government source told CNN. Officials believe the men -- identified by state media as being from Russia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan -- entered Turkey from the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa in Syria, bringing with them the suicide vests and bombs used in the attack,
the source said.
The ISIS militant group -- led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, pictured -- began as a splinter group of al Qaeda.
Its aim is to create an Islamic state, or caliphate, across Iraq and Syria. It is implementing Sharia law, rooted in eighth-century Islam, to establish a society that mirrors the region's ancient past. It is known for killing dozens of people at a time and carrying out public executions.
Kurdish Peshmerga fighters fire missiles during clashes with ISIS in Jalawla, Iraq, on June 14, 2014. That month, ISIS took control of Mosul and Tikrit, two major cities in northern Iraq.
Traffic from Mosul lines up at a checkpoint in Kalak, Iraq, on June 14, 2014. Thousands of people
fled Mosul after it was overrun by ISIS.
ISIS fighters parade down an Iraqi street in this image released by the group in July 2014.
Aziza Hamid, a 15-year-old Iraqi girl, cries for her father while she and other Yazidi people are flown to safety after a
dramatic rescue operation at Iraq's Mount Sinjar on August 11, 2014. A CNN crew
was on the flight, which took diapers, milk, water and food to the site where as many as 70,000 people were trapped by ISIS. Only a few of them were able to fly back on the helicopter with the Iraqi Air Force and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.
On August 19, 2014, American journalist James Foley
was decapitated by ISIS militants in a video posted on YouTube. A month later, they released videos showing the executions of American journalist Steven Sotloff and British aid worker David Haines.
ISIS militants stand near the site of an airstrike near the Turkey-Syria border on October 23, 2014. The United States and several Arab nations
began bombing ISIS targets in Syria to take out the group's ability to command, train and resupply its fighters.
A Kurdish marksman stands atop a building as he looks at the destroyed Syrian town of Kobani on January 30, 2015. After four months of fighting, Peshmerga forces
liberated the city from the grip of ISIS.
Safi al-Kasasbeh, right, receives condolences from tribal leaders at his home village near Karak, Jordan, on February 4, 2015. Al-Kasasbeh's son,
Jordanian pilot Moath al-Kasasbeh, was burned alive in a video that was released by ISIS militants. Jordan is one of a handful of Middle Eastern nations taking part in the U.S.-led military coalition against ISIS.
In February 2015, British newspapers report the identity of "Jihadi John," the disguised man with a British accent who had appeared in ISIS videos executing Western hostages. The militant was identified as Mohammed Emwazi, a Kuwaiti-born Londoner. On November 12, 2015, the Pentagon announced that Emwazi was in a vehicle
hit by a drone strike. ISIS later confirmed his death.
In March 2015, ISIS released video and images of a man being thrown off a rooftop in Raqqa, Syria. In the last photograph, the man is seen face down, surrounded by a small crowd of men carrying weapons and rocks. The caption reads "stoned to death." The victim was brutally killed
because he was accused of being gay.
An Iraqi soldier searches for ISIS fighters in Tikrit on March 30, 2015. Iraqi forces
retook the city after it had been in ISIS control since June 2014.
Dead bodies lie near a beachside hotel in Sousse, Tunisia, after
a gunman opened fire on June 26, 2015. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed at least 38 people and wounded at least 36 others, many of them Western tourists. Two U.S. officials said they believed the attack might have been inspired by ISIS but not directed by it.
ISIS also claimed responsibility for what it called a suicide bombing
at the Al-Sadiq mosque in Kuwait City on June 26, 2015. At least 27 people were killed and at least 227 were wounded, state media reported at the time. The bombing came on the same day as the attack on the Tunisian beach.
A man inspects the aftermath of a car bombing in Khan Bani Saad, Iraq, on July 18, 2015.
A suicide bomber with an ice truck, promising cheap relief from the scorching summer heat, lured more than 100 people to their deaths. ISIS claimed responsibility on Twitter.
Two women hold hands after an explosion in Suruc, Turkey, on July 20, 2015. The blast
occurred at the Amara Cultural Park, where a group was calling for help to rebuild the Syrian city of Kobani, CNN Turk reported. At least 32 people were killed and at least 100 were wounded in the bombing. Turkish authorities said they believed ISIS was involved in the explosion.
Spectators at the Stade de France in Paris run onto the soccer field after explosions were heard outside the stadium on November 13, 2015. Three teams of gun-wielding ISIS militants
hit six locations around the city, killing at least 129 people and wounding hundreds.
Law enforcement officers search a residential area in San Bernardino, California, after a
mass shooting killed at least 14 people and injured 21 on December 2, 2015.
The shooters -- Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik -- were fatally shot in a gunbattle with police hours after the initial incident. The couple supported ISIS and had been planning the attack for some time, investigators said.
Two wounded women sit in the airport in Brussels, Belgium, after two explosions rocked the facility on March 22, 2016. A subway station in the city
was also targeted in terrorist attacks that killed at least 30 people and injured hundreds more. Investigators say the suspects belonged to the same ISIS network that was behind the Paris terror attacks in November.
A boy walks past bloodstains and debris at a cafe in Balad, Iraq, that was attacked by ISIS gunmen on May 13, 2016. Twenty people were killed.
Iraqi government forces patrol in southern Falluja, Iraq, on June 10, 2016. In late June,
a senior Iraqi general announced that the battle to reclaim Falluja from ISIS had been won.
These attacks on ISIS' cash supply and revenue streams have had real effects on ISIS' bottom line. ISIS has had to halve the salaries of its foot soldiers, according to documents that leaked from the terrorist army earlier this year.
Who is ultimately responsible for all the damage that has been done to ISIS? The supposed founder of ISIS, President Obama.
As to the charge that Clinton co-founded ISIS, she left the State Department in January 2013 and ISIS wasn't founded until three months later.
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US exit from Iraq
Trump's charge does raise an interesting question, which is how best to assign responsibility for the rise of ISIS, including the issue of how might the Obama administration's exit from Iraq at the end of 2011 have helped smooth the path for ISIS?
The rise of ISIS starts with a Jordanian thug named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who founded ISIS' parent organization, al Qaeda in Iraq. What gave Zarqawi the opportunity to create al Qaeda in Iraq? It was, of course, George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein brutally repressed all forms of opposition to his regime and before the Iraq War, al Qaeda had no presence in Iraq.
None of these factors can be easily ascribed to Obama or to Clinton, although certainly they did preside over the withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq at the end of 2011, a plan bequeathed to them by Bush.
Could the Obama administration have fought harder to retain a US troop presence in Iraq? Possibly.
Would the Iraqi government have allowed such a presence? Not likely as the Iraq government was by the time of the U.S. withdrawal more aligned with Iran than with the United States.
Obama was also slow to recognize the threat posed by ISIS, famously referring to the Islamist terrorist group gaining ground in Syria and Iraq as a "JV" team in a January 2014 interview.
Could the Obama administration do more to counter ISIS? Yes. In northern Syria, a no-fly zone targeted at Assad's air force and safe zones for refugees fleeing the fighting would help halt the massive flow of refugees out of Syria, many of whom are heading to Europe, and also help reduce whatever remains of ISIS' appeal to the Sunni population of Syria, to whom it can pose as their defenders against the Syrian regime.
It is Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, who is advocating for this common sense measure, which is a policy that could actually help tamp down the violence and killing in which ISIS thrives. Of course, Trump has no real policy ideas about what to do about ISIS because he seems incapable of producing them, other than empty slogans like he would "bomb the s...t out of" ISIS.
As Petraeus acidly observed in June, "I think carpet bombing is an absolutely tremendous idea if the enemy accommodates you by laying himself out like a carpet in the middle of the desert, without any civilians or infrastructure around him. Sadly, the Islamic State has learned that that is a losing proposition and does not accommodate us in that way. In fact, the Islamic State is very much underground now in places like Mosul and Raqqa."