While the campaign against Islamic State in Iraq, Syria and now Libya is making significant gains, the group is adapting, reverting to high-profile attacks and using the internet to recruit and train, and to encourage “lone wolf” attacks.
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Speaking to reporters after a meeting with top Pentagon officials, Obama said that as the group lost territory, it has begun moving its focus to terror attacks overseas. “The possibility of either a lone actor or a small cell carrying out an attack that kills people is real”.
“That includes an end to the kinds of aerial bombing and civilian death and destruction that we’ve seen carried out by the Assad regime, and Russian Federation may not be able to get there – either because they don’t want to or because they don’t have sufficient influence over President Bashar al-Assad – and that’s what we’re going to test”.
ON Thursday, Obama used his news conference to offer something of a rebuttal, even if he did not name Trump until reporters asked specifically about him.
The strikes came at the request of Libya’s Western-backed unity government as its forces battled to reclaim the Mediterranean coastal city, which became an important Islamic State stronghold after militants seized it a year ago.
“Those kinds of strategies can end up backfiring because in order for us to ultimately win this fight we cannot frame this as a clash of civilisations between the West and Islam”, he said.
Obama also addressed November’s presidential polls, saying Republican candidate Donald Trump’s suggestions that the elections could be rigged are “ridiculous”.
Mr Obama also said that IS “has not had a major successful offensive operation in Syria or Iraq in a full year”.
The successes against ISIL mean more intelligence the coalition can exploit to further take the fight to ISIL, the president said.
“There was a paragraph in there that some may have caught, which we don’t know for a fact that this is true – but according to this reporting, the individual indicated that ISIL recognizes that it is harder to get its operatives into the United States”.
US -backed ground forces in Iraq and Syria have recaptured about 40% of the ground ISIL had seized.
“In other words ISIL turns out not to be invincible”.
Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, when asked last month if the USA could trust Russian Federation to embark on additional cooperation, said negotiations over the deal weren’t based on trust.
He says the USA and its North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies must not succumb to fear and should “keep on grinding away” against the group. “Those networks will probably sustain themselves even after ISIS is defeated in Raqqa and Mosul”, he said, using another acronym for the group.
“We’re taking this extremely seriously”, Obama said. He pointed out that the twisted ideology of the militant group persists and drives people to violence and that?s why his country is working to counter violent extremism more broadly, including the social, economic and political factors that help fuel groups like ISIL and Al Qaeda in the first place. “It makes us weaker and more vulnerable and creates politics that divide us and hurt us over the long run”.
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“In order for us to ultimately win this fight, we can not frame this as a clash of civilizations between the West and Islam”, he said, arguing that such a strategy would play into the radical group’s hands and undermine the fabric of American society.
