Now he’s turned his attention to fighting the Islamic State. While several of the candidates – including Florida Sen.
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But the Paris attack is certain to push even those topics to the side, at least temporarily, as world leaders confront the scale of the attack in the French capital.
A 1991 Conard High School graduate who received a bachelor’s degree from the University of CT before obtaining a law degree from Columbia University, McGurk has had a long career at the State Department despite his relatively young age.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said: “This attack on freedom is not only aimed at Paris”. Perhaps it does not even matter – the Charlie Hebdo attackers knew each other but differed over allegiance, two declaring themselves loyal to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, one to Isil.
Earlier in the year, Obama chaired a session of the United Nations Security Council meant to address the flow of foreign fighters coming from Syria, following up on the meeting during this year’s general assembly by saying he wanted to focus on the origins of extremism.
Allen said that as the fight against ISIS has grown more prolonged, the USA has been learning that it can not combat terror groups – which Allen labeled as symptoms – without addressing underlying conditions that help their spread.
It was a harsh political irony that the killings in France took place on the same day that an interview aired in which the President argued that his strategy had “contained” ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
Obama will also encounter Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose recent efforts in Syria forced the administration to retool its strategy.
ISIS’ assertion of culpability was made in a statement in Arabic and French released online Saturday and circulated by supporters of the group asserting that “Soldiers of the Caliphate” have struck a bad blow to the French infidels. The US, meanwhile, was irked by Erdogan’s reluctance to join the campaign against the Islamic State, though Turkey eventually chose to start bombing the militants this summer and also allowed the U.S.to launch its own airstrikes from key bases in the county.
“The president said there would be no ground troops; now there are ground troops”, Murphy said.
The president and his national security aides will “review the latest intelligence surrounding the attacks in Paris”, the White House said. Tell that to French people, Mr. President! “Per capita, they have a few of the highest numbers of foreign fighters heading to and from Syria”, as well as unparallelled “facilitation pipelines for terrorists”. “But I think we do ourselves a disservice in this fight if we are not taking into account the fact that the overwhelming majority of Muslims reject this ideology”.
“We are clearly not dealing with leashed animals or with a JV team”, Huckabee said. France responded nearly immediately by closing off its borders.
Trump, for his part, went after gun control on Saturday. “You can say what you want, but if they had guns, if our people had guns, if they were allowed to carry…it would’ve been a much, much different situation”.
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And as governmental efforts make it more hard for radicalised individuals in France to reach Iraq and Syria, they may “act out at home”, he said. And the legacy of President George W. Bush, whom many Democrats blame for ripping the lid off boiling sectarian strife in the Middle East with the invasion of Iraq, continues to haunt the GOP when it comes to national security policy.
