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The final U.S. Institute of Peace Task Force report will be released February 26, 2019. Continue on for a summary and for the interim report.

"Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan said Saturday after visiting the U.S.-Mexico border that the government needs a broader, more effective approach to border control. He suggested the Pentagon might contribute with its expertise in surveillance and monitoring."

"The Trump administration decision to keep hundreds of U.S. troops based in Syria was driven by allies who said they wouldn’t stay behind to prevent a resurgence of the Islamic State extremist group without an American presence, a senior U.S. defense official said Saturday."

"Acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan toured the U.S. border with Mexico on Saturday as the Pentagon prepares to allocate billions of dollars toward the construction of President Trump’s border wall."

"The Pentagon will increase the number of troops along the U.S.-Mexico border to about 6,000 by the start of next month as the Trump administration turns its attention to securing remote areas between official ports of entry, a senior U.S. defense official said Friday."

"It was May 23, 2017, and the general was the same officer I had worked with on my first deployment to the Philippines as a Special Forces officer seven years earlier. When he hung up, he explained that an important mission was occurring at that moment, and he was simply getting updates. The call reminded me of how we used to talk during that first deployment to the country. What I didn’t know was that the mission he was tracking was particularly significant: the first engagement in what would become the Battle of Marawi. That siege would rage in the southern city for five months."

"Three members of the Venezuelan national guard have left their posts ahead of an opposition-led effort to to bring aid into the country, Colombia's migration agency said."

"If one accepts that the American military is the most powerful armed force in human history, why does it have a mixed record when it comes to building up foreign armies in weak states?"

"The U.S. military on Friday began to revamp its strategy in Syria, after President Trump decided to shift course and keep several hundred American troops in the country."

"The fragile security in Nigeria, set to become the world’s third-most populous country by 2050, has been a central theme in the run-up to national elections scheduled for Feb. 23 after a weeklong delay. President Muhammadu Buhari, a Fulani former military leader who was elected in 2015, has failed to stop the violence in Nigeria’s so-called Middle Belt, a swath of states riven by the long-simmering conflict between farmers and herders."

"Food and medicine for Venezuela’s sick and famished citizens lie just beyond their reach in warehouses across the country’s borders and on islands off its coast, as a showdown approaches for getting the aid into their hands. The United States has promised $20 million in humanitarian relief for Venezuelans."

"Military communities whose local construction projects weren’t scheduled to begin until later this year are among the most likely to be cut to fund the border wall, two U.S. officials who briefed reporters at the Pentagon said Friday."

The six things you should know about this historic controversy...

"As Islamic State’s once-large physical domain shrinks to nothing, its media presence is no longer the mighty propaganda powerhouse that, at its height, flooded social media with nearly 40 statements, videos and other media items a day, according to a 2015 report by the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence, a London think tank."

"The dilemma of what to do with citizens of Western countries who threw in their lot with the Islamic State before it was largely ousted from Syria has set off a debate over citizenship and the statelessness that might result from stripping some of them of their nationality."

"Venezuelan soldiers opened fire on a group of civilians attempting to keep open a segment of the southern border with Brazil for deliveries of humanitarian aid, causing multiple injuries and the first fatalities of a massive opposition operation meant to deliver international relief to this devastated South American country, according to eyewitnesses and community leaders."

"Islamic State fighters facing defeat in Syria are slipping across the border into Iraq, where they are destabilizing the country’s fragile security, U.S. and Iraqi officials say."

"Coalition warplanes launched new airstrikes against the last remaining enclave of the Islamic State terror group's self-declared caliphate after efforts to evacuate additional civilians stalled. The strikes, accompanied by artillery fire, targeted the outskirts of the final piece of IS-held territory in the eastern Syrian village of Baghuz on Thursday, a day after 2,000 civilians were evacuated from the area."

"The U.S. will maintain a small peacekeeping force of about 200 troops in Syria despite President Trump’s earlier decision to remove all American troops, the White House said Thursday, illustrating the complications of a hastily announced withdrawal."

"The U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant spent hours on end planning a wide-scale domestic terrorist attack, even logging in at his work computer on the job at headquarters to study the manifestos and heinous paths of mass shooters, prosecutors say. He researched how to carry out sniper attacks, they contend, and whether rifle scopes were illegal. And all the while, investigators assert, he was amassing a cache of weapons as he ruminated about attacks on politicians and journalists."

"The Pentagon has asked Department of Homeland Security to identify locations where border wall construction would improve the “effectiveness" of military troops deployed there, a key justification required to redirect military construction spending that would otherwise go to local base projects."

"Johan Cosar went to Syria not to fight for the Islamic State group, but against them. Now, the former Swiss army officer is facing a military tribunal back home. He is charged with joining a foreign army and thus undermining Switzerland's neutrality and security."

"Five U.S. citizens who were among eight men detained over the weekend in Haiti with automatic weapons and other arms have returned to the United States.'

"Questions remain about whether the Taliban is genuinely willing to break with al Qaeda—the very prospect at which the group balked back in 2001, prompting the United States to invade."

"U.S. Africa Command plans to begin routing flights to Accra, Ghana, as the hub of a new logistics network to ferry supplies and weapons to the patches of U.S. troops operating across the continent’s increasingly turbulent western region."