Masrour Barzani, prime minister of the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan, issued the stark warning amid moves by President Trump to withdraw US troops from the region after years of fighting.

While ISIS has lost all of its territory and much of its leadership, Barzani believes the terror group still has 20,000 fighters in Iraq and Syria and is trying to recruit more.

That number is double the initial US estimates of ISIS’s strength when it began capturing territory across Iraq and Syria in 2014, sparking an international crisis.

Revised CIA estimates put that number at 31,000, while Iraqi security advisers estimated it had 100,000 fighters by the time it announced the formation of a ‘caliphate’ in July that year.