BNI – In other words, references to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) will no longer hide its “Islamic” roots as American and European leaders have been trying to do. Thank you, General Mattis.

FOX News  The Pentagon has officially declared the name of the terror group the United States and its allies have been fighting for years is, in fact, ISIS.

“We have officially switched to ISIS,” Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a briefing with reporters Friday. Davis said ISIS already had been used unofficially in the past inside the Pentagon because it was the “easiest to understand.”

While “ISIS” has been widely accepted for years as the common acronym for the Islamic State, then-Secretary of State John Kerry and others in the Obama administration insisted for years on using “ISIL” (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant -including Israel) or “Daesh,” the acronym formed using Arabic letter.

The Pentagon released a memorandum Friday afternoon dated Feb. 13 outlining the official change.In the months leading up to the election, then-candidate Donald Trump blasted then-President Barack Obama for not using the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism.”  

He didn’t use the phrase because he insisted, “loose language that appears to pose a civilizational conflict between the West and Islam, or the modern world and Islam, then we make it harder, not easier, for our friends and allies and ordinary people to resist and push back against the worst impulses inside the Muslim world,” Obama told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.

Obama also didn’t want the fight against ISIS, Al Qaeda or the Taliban to appear to be a “clash of civilizations” a phrase made famous by the late academic Samuel Huntington in an article by the same name. Instead, Obama and his administration used the phrase “violent extremism” to describe the terror threat.