President Barack Obama on Monday said the U.S.-led coalition is making progress against Islamic State militants in both Iraq and Syria, as he delivered an update meant to reassure Americans anxious about the spread of terrorism.
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“As I said before, ISIL (another acronym for IS) is dug in, including in urban areas, and they hide behind civilians, using defenseless men, women and children as human shields”, said Obama at the Pentagon after meting with his top national security advisers.
Washington announced in late October that Mr Obama had approved sending up to 50 special operations troops to Syria – the first such deployment in the war-ravaged country – but until now USA officials had refused to say whether they had begun their mission. With training and support from USA and coalition airstrikes, Iraqi forces have slowly closed in on Ramadi, taking back a key operations center and bridge from the Islamic State in the last two weeks.
“Even as we’re relentless we need to be smart, targeting ISIL surgically and with precision”, Obama said.
Obama noted Secretary of Defense Ash Carter will travel this week to the Middle East to continue to garner support for the counter-Islamic State campaign by US allies in the region.
Particularly after the Paris and San Bernardino attacks, questions have been raised about the effectiveness of the Obama administration’s strategy to degrade and destroy Islamic State.
The fight against the terrorists, admitted the president was “difficult” and that progress needs to come faster.
As a follow-up to his Oval Office speech, which earlier this month offered nothing new on whatever the administration strategy is for fighting ISIS, Obama yesterday offered remarks from the Pentagon, using lots of the nation’s top military commanders as stage props. Obama wants Turkey to firmly seal its borders with Iraq and Syria.
Before those incidents, Obama sounded confident in coalition efforts against ISIS, saying in interviews that the group’s land-grab was “contained” and that the USA homeland has “never been more protected”. At the National Counterterrorism Center, which analyzes intelligence at its facility in suburban Virginia, Obama planned to address reporters Thursday after a briefing by intelligence and security agencies on threat assessments.
But the comparisons do underscore the point made by the president’s hawkish critics that his strategy is unlikely to remove the ISIS threat any time soon.
Donald Trump’s pledge to bar Muslims from the United States was opposed by a majority of the public. Forty-nine percent, including 7 in 10 Republicans but just 3 in 10 Democrats, say there an extremely or somewhat high risk of Syrian refugees committing acts of religious or political violence in the United States.
The percentage of Americans who favor deploying American troops has risen from 31 percent to 42 percent over the past year in AP-GfK polling, although it isn’t clear whether those respondents favor a small contingent or a larger force that might engage in another protracted Middle Eastern war.
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Meanwhile, the USA will continue to work to further build up global contributions to the coalition’s effort to defeat Islamic State.
