Obama on Thursday, speaking to reporters at the Pentagon, made clear that both candidates would be treated equally.
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Mr Obama said earlier this week that the U.S. and its allies didn’t adequately attend to Libya after a 2011 military intervention that toppled the government there, leaving room for extremists to take hold. “We didn’t here and we won’t in the future”.
He pointed out that the payment, along with an additional $1.3 billion in interest to be paid later, was announced by the administration when it was concluded in January, a day after the implementation of a landmark nuclear agreement with Iran.
“It wasn’t a secret”. And he said: “We’re taking this extremely seriously”.
Obama was responding to the revelation, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, that $400 million of the settlement was delivered by plane to Iran in cash. The Assad regime has earned the condemnation of the world, he said, and Russian Federation must work with the world community to pull the situation back from the brink. “The reason that we had to give them cash is precisely because we are so strict in maintaining sanctions, and we do not have a banking relationship with Iran, that we couldn’t send them a check, and we could not wire the money”, he added.
Numerous questions that came the president’s way focused on Trump.
Obama today equated Trump’s comments to children in the schoolyard complaining about a loss “before the score is even tallied”.
President Obama on Thursday said the Islamic State has not had a major battlefield success in Iraq and Syria in a year but said there is still a threat of lone wolf and high-profile attacks.
Obama defended his strategy – which backs local ground forces and militias fighting the extremist group with US airstrikes and other military assistance – by outlining how the tactics have rolled back the extremist group’s territory in Iraq and Syria, while stemming its flow of foreign fighters and cash.
Asked whether he feels any personal disappointment about not being able to do more to stop the Islamic State, Obama said, “I haven’t gotten numb to it”.
During the question session, also criticized Russian Federation for its continuing support of Syrian government attacks against opposition forces and its sieges of populated areas like Aleppo.
Speaking at a news conference at the Pentagon today, President Obama declared himself “pleased” with the progress in the ongoing ISIS war, insisting the U.S. had been making “significant gains” both in Iraq and Syria “and now Libya”, which the USA started attacking on Monday.
Obama said every time there is a terrorist attack he feels disappointment, because he would like to prevent all of them.
“But if we start making bad decisions, indiscriminately killing civilians for example in some of these areas, instituting offensive religious tests on who can enter the country, you know, those kinds of strategies can end up backfiring”.
Trump has placed blame on Clinton and Obama for the rise of Islamic State, also known as ISIS. “And we’ll keep hitting them and pushing them back and driving them out until they do”, he said.
“And if Mr. Trump is suggesting that there is a conspiracy theory that is being propagated across the country, including in places like Texas, where typically it’s not Democrats who are in charge of voting booths, that’s ridiculous”, he said.
He said the last two years of the US -led air and ground campaign have proved that the extremist group can be beaten in conventional military fights but that it has shown the ability to carry out damaging, small-scale attacks.
President Barack Obama tried to talk down Islamic State terrorism during his press conference at the Pentagon, insisting that it would be defeated “inevitably”.
After Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi was ousted in 2011, IS extremists targeted Libya as a safe haven outside its initial strongholds in Iraq and Syria. In Libya, U.S. airstrikes are helping forces loyal to the Government of National Accord in taking the ISIL stronghold of Sirte.
The president said the United States must do a better job of “draining” the ideology that is behind the attacks. That has made the sort of homegrown extremists’ strategy more attractive to them. The U.S. -led coalition began attacking ISIL fighters in 2014 after they swept through large parts of Iraq and Syria.
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“That right now is emanating largely out of the Middle East, and a very small fraction of the Muslim world”, he said.
