Trump calls ISIS fighters ‘sneaky, dirty rats’

President Trump on Thursday ripped the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) for its tactics, calling ISIS fighters “sick and demented.”

“They’re sneaky, dirty rats,” Trump told Fox News’s Sean Hannity in an interview airing Thursday night. “These are bad people.”

“They blow people up in a shopping center, and they blow people up in a church,” Trump added of the radical Islamic terrorist group. “[They] are sick and demented, and we’re going to win.”

{mosads}Trump said ISIS is particularly dangerous because it shuns conventional methods of warfare such as military identification.

“We have evil that lurks around the corner without the uniforms,” he said. “The people we’re going against, they don’t wear uniforms.”

“When you’re fighting Germany and they had their uniforms and you’re fighting Japan and they had their uniforms and they had their flags on the plane and the whole thing — we are fighting sneaky rats right now,” Trump added, referencing World War II.

Trump vowed during his inaugural speech last week that the U.S. would spearhead efforts to eliminate radical Islamic terrorism.

“We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones — and unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth,” he said during his Jan. 20 address.

Iraqi security forces, meanwhile, expelled ISIS fighters from Eastern Mosul on Tuesday, according to the U.S.-led military coalition aiding their efforts.

“After more than 100 days of hard urban combat, the government of Iraq and Iraqi security forces announced the liberation of Eastern Mosul, Jan. 24,” read a coalition statement.

Mosul is the second-largest city in Iraq and remains ISIS’s last stronghold there after it seized the city in a lightning advance from Syria in 2014.

Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, the commanding officer of the multinational coalition tasked with militarily defeating ISIS, said Tuesday that freeing Western Mosul may prove more arduous.

“There is still a long way to go before ISIL is completely eliminated from Iraq, and the fight for Western Mosul is likely to be even tougher than the Eastern side,” said Townsend, commanding general of Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve, using an alternate acronym for ISIS.