Monday morning, we learned that US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel will be resigning, apparently pushed out by the Obama administration. On Twitter, ISIS claimed responsibility — with a hashtag and an image meme.
The hashtag, translated from the Arabic, reads, "The Islamic State Topples the American Defense Minister." There are fancy social media graphics for it and everything:
Secretary of Defence Hagel resigned ... #IS celebrates with hashtag #الدولة_الإسلامية_تطيح_بوزير_الدفاع_الامريكي pic.twitter.com/VY0kyQDhJH
— Pieter Van Ostaeyen (@p_vanostaeyen) November 24, 2014
According to the New York Times, one of the reasons Hagel left is because of a White House "recognition that the threat from the Islamic State would require a different kind of skills than those that Mr. Hagel was brought on to employ." The Obama administration lost faith in Hagel's ability to manage the fight against ISIS, and so he's gone.
That said, ISIS can't really brag about its performance against the Hagel-supervised US military. Though airstrikes can't destroy ISIS, they've helped slow the group's advance in Iraq considerably.
