(CNN) – If the U.S. decides to increase the number of targets across Iraq, it will face ground difficulties of taking on ISIS.

It's one thing to take out ISIS militants around Amerli, a farming hamlet of less than 20,000 people in the middle of nowhere, where U.S. airstrikes are extremely effective.

It's a different ball game in the strongholds like Mosul, Tikrit, and Fallujah where there are millions of people. It would fundamentally become an urban warfare.

CNN's Anna Coren reports.

(CNN) – Control the message, control the people. Journalists and media outlets covering the Russian incursion into the Ukrainian territory of Crimea are now increasingly subjected to a crackdown for simply trying to report what they see.

CNN's Anna Coren and her team were ordered by management at their hotel to stop broadcasting or they'd be kicked out.

By Anna Coren

Major General Tony Thomas is the most experienced special operations leader in the U.S. military. Thomas is the first NATO commander of all special forces in Afghanistan and has spent every year here since 9/11, with the exception of a 12-month deployment in Iraq.

We were with one of his units in eastern Afghanistan. When trying to capture a bomb maker, they were ambushed by the Taliban.

One region close to the Pakistan border is a hotbed for the insurgency, with U.S. forces coming under weekly attacks.

"We came into this thing saying it would probably take a generation to change the situation in Afghanistan, we have a 12-year-old right now, 12 years isn't a sufficient amount of time to say that's it," said Thomas.

But the U.S. is withdrawing, and it's now up to Afghanistan's 350,000 soldiers and police to lead the fight.
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