About half the city has been retaken from ISIL.
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Based on interviews with Harry Sarfo, a would-be foreign fighter now imprisoned in Germany, it explains how members of the Islamic State’s secret service, a group called Emni, no longer want Europeans to come to Syria.
Still, nothing can be certain or foolproof, the president said. “The possibility of either a one actor or either a small cell carrying out an attack that kills people is real”.
Speaking at a news conference after a briefing at the Pentagon, Obama said the Sunni Muslim extremist group has suffered so many setbacks on the battlefield that it has begun to concede its goal of holding a permanent territorial footprint in the Middle East.
“That’s why the military strategy we have in Syria and Iraq is necessary, but it is not sufficient”. High on the agenda: the nascent US air campaign against IS targets in Libya. American pilots are doing their absolute best to avoid civilian casualties, he said, in stark contrast to ISIL, which uses noncombatants as shields. “They will inevitably be defeated”.
Despite the massive effort, the jihadists still hold Mosul – Iraq’s second-largest city – and the Syrian city of Raqqa.
Like his session alongside Singapore’s prime minister in the White House East Room on Tuesday – during which he declared Trump “woefully unprepared” for the role of commander in chief – Obama will rely on the authority of the setting to lend credence to his criticisms of the GOP nominee. However, there’s been virtually no evidence of large-scale voter fraud in the United States in recent elections.
Since then, the coalition has conducted daily plane and drone strikes – more than 14,000 so far – and worked with local forces on the ground to gradually reclaim the seized territory.
Obama also cautioned on working with Russian Federation.
Though he didn’t name Trump, it was clear he was addressing the Republican nominee who has said he would “bomb the shit out of them (the IS)”, and has proposed denying entry into the USA for immigrants from areas of the world “compromised” by terrorism.
“Even ISIL’s leaders know they’re going to keep losing”.
“All of us as some points in our lives have played sports or maybe just played in a schoolyard, or a sandbox, and sometimes folks if they lose they complain that they got cheated”, he said. “And we’ll keep hitting them and pushing them back and driving them out until they do”.
A plan is in place for the “day after” ISIL is gone, the president said.
The president conceded the complexity of the challenge in Syria, where the multi-sided 5-year-old civil war is a major impediment to finding and killing the militants.
In a strong message to Russia, Obama said that the country’s direct involvement in these actions over the last several weeks raises very serious questions about their commitment to pull the situation back from the brink.
“So in some ways, rooting out these networks for smaller, less complicated attacks is tougher because it doesn’t require as many resources on their part or preparation, but it does mean we have to do even more to generate the intelligence and to work with our partners in order to degrade those networks”.
WASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama says the USA does not pay ransom for hostages.
Still, Obama said, “their military defeat will not be enough….”
Though dozens of Americans have become members of the Islamic State, and some have been recruited into the external operations wing, “they know it’s hard for them to get Americans into America” once they have traveled to Syria, he said.
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“But none of this is surprising from an Administration that allowed its Secretary of State to threaten the country with a private email server, delete her records, and lie about it to us all”, Miller said.
