Eurasia Press & News
On the eve of the thirteenth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks U.S. President Obama announced a raft of measures upping the ante against Islamic State, the militant outfit that now controls large swathes of Iraq and Syria, including airstrikes in Syria and 475 additional personnel to arrive soon in Iraq to serve as “military advisers.”
Mr. Obama warned IS, which in recent weeks posted videos online showing the gruesome decapitation of two American journalists, “This is a core principle of my presidency: if you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.”
He argued that IS was neither Islamic, for “no religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim,” and nor was it a state, given that it was formerly an al Qaeda affiliate in Iraq, and is “recognised by no government, nor the people it subjugates, [but] is a terrorist organisation, pure and simple…”
While the latest addition of U.S. military personnel brings their total number to 1,600 in the country, the President left open-ended the question of a timeline or a specific end-date for military operations in the region, the identity of Syrian opposition groups with whom the U.S. will seek to cooperate, or any plans for building cross-sectarian political institutions that could fill the space left by a “degraded” IS.
In his closely-watched speech Mr. Obama declared his unwillingness to work with the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, yet he promised that a systematic, comprehensive and sustained campaign to “degrade and ultimately destroy” IS would go hand-in-hand with increased military assistance to Iraqi and Kurdish forces, as well as to the Syrian opposition.
