President Obama said Russia must make a strategic decision about Syria and the next several weeks will show whether Russian President Vladimir Putin will give up backing the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad to join in a broad campaign against Islamic State.
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Bashar Assad says the Russians depend on Syrian ground forces and that their campaign is more effective than that of the USA led coalition because quote “you can not fight terrorism with airstrikes alone”.
Obama said he told Putin he needs to go after the people who killed Russian citizens, and those aren’t the groups that Russian warplane pilots are now hitting with strikes in Syria. The two met last week during an economic summit in Turkey. Obama on Sunday said he would host the leaders of 10 Southeast Asian nations next year as he rejected accusations that Middle East turmoil was distracting him from focusing on Asia.
As Obama spoke in the Malaysian capital, other Western leaders were stepping up their rhetoric against Islamic State, while the European diplomatic hub of Brussels remained under the highest threat level for the second day in a row. French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said the West would “annihilate Islamic State worldwide”. He is also scheduled to meet on Tuesday with President Francois Hollande of France to discuss the terror strikes in Paris.
It comes as Putin arrived in Iran for talks about the conflict in war-ravaged Syria with supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and president Hassan Rouhani. Elections would take place within 18 months, under the proposal.
He expressed concern that legislation being considered in the U.S. House, though not as radical as that voiced by a few Republican presidential candidates in the past week, could “gum up the works so much” that it would effectively end the refugee program for “people who desperately need it”, particularly children. In Turkey and the Philippines last week, Obama pushed back on those proposals as un-American, drawing criticism from a few who said he failed to grasp Americans’ post-Paris fears. Obama promised that Islamic extremists would find no safe haven anywhere, while the leader of Muslim-majority Malaysia branded the Islamic State group as a “new evil” that has blasphemed the religion, and urged world leaders to confront it forcefully.
“Our nation was horrified, but it’s not going to be terrorized”, President George W. Bush declared five days after those attacks. He said the US had survived mass casualties before and pointed out that New York’s Times Square was again filled with people – “rightly so”.
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The Erbil airport spokesman said a change in the missiles’ route brought them “uncomfortably close” to the airport, without providing more details.
