Mr Obama held a meeting with his top military advisors at the Pentagon, where he said there had now been almost 9,000 air strikes and IS was being hit “harder than ever”.
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“We recognize that progress needs to happen faster”, Obama said Monday. The fronts on which the attacks are focused include, stopping ISIS propaganda and their fear tactics, working to end the civil war in Syria, and training and equipping Syrian forces involved in the fight.
“We are hitting ISIL harder than ever”, Obama said, using the shorthand for the Islamic State group.
Sounding a notably more strident tone, Obama said that the United States and its allies were taking the fight to Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
It’s been more than a year since U.S. President Barack Obama has convened his national security team at the Pentagon. “I’ll say it again, prejudice and discrimination helps ISIL and it undermines our national security”, Obama said. He said terrorists like Islamic State are “trying to divide us along lines of religion and background”.
The president also said that the jihadists have lost 40 percent of the area it previously controlled in Iraq.
While he says ISIS is losing its ability to fight, the group’s ability to terrorize remains largely unchecked.
President Obama is addressing the terrorism threat to the United States and the recent attack in San Bernardino, California.
The Pentagon also has stepped up airstrikes on the Islamic State’s oil infrastructure, which is a key source of revenue for the group, and recently dispatched a 200-member Special Operations task force to Iraq to target ISIS’s senior leadership.
“ISIL leaders can not hide and our message to them is ‘you are next, ‘” Obama said.
“The American people are smart enough to know when something is working or not, and it’s obvious that the president’s current strategy isn’t working”, Republican House Majority leader Kevin McCarthy said in response to Obama’s Pentagon appearance.
Other people who attended the meeting included Secretary of State John Kerry, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, presidential envoy in the anti-ISIS coalition Brett McGurk, and Rob Malley, the new ISIS czar, among others. Lately, after the San Bernardino shootings, Barack Obama talked about terrorism more than we were used to, but the White House has resisted calls to escalate the war. He’s scheduled to be briefed Thursday at the National Counterterrorism Center on efforts to prevent attacks in the U.S.
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Obama – with the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan seared into his political psyche – has steadfastly ruled out deploying large numbers of infantry troops in Iraq and Syria.
