President Obama said Sunday that he would not relent in the fight against the Islamic State, and said he has ordered defense officials to find out whether intelligence reports had been altered to reflect a more optimistic assessment of the U.S. military campaign against the group. “The most powerful tool we have to fight ISIL is to say that we’re not afraid, to not elevate them, to somehow buy into their fantasy that they’re doing something important”, Obama said, using an acronym for the terrorist organization.
Advertisement
The President also pressed Russian President Vladimir Putin to align himself with the US-led coalition, noting that the ISIS has been accused of bringing down a Russian passenger jet in October, killing 224 people.
In Malaysia, where Mr. Obama attended a pair of regional summits, the president vowed to hunt down terrorist leaders and destroy their networks. While Russia has stepped up its air campaign in Syria, Obama said Moscow has focused its attention on moderate rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad, a Russian ally. “We can’t stop the fighting”.
“They’re a group of executioners with great online networking”, Obama told journalists Sunday. The president and world leaders are set to gather in Paris next week for long-scheduled climate talks.
Speaking dismissively of IS’ global prowess, Obama said, “They’re a bunch of killers with good social media”.
The president also paid tribute to Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old from California who was killed in the Paris attacks, and Anita Ashok Datar, a 41-year-old from Maryland who died in Friday’s attack in Mali.
A senior US official on Tuesday said Washington has seen “increased tensions between Russian Federation and Iran over the question of the future of Syria”, the journal reported. This explains the ongoing U.S.-Russia war, even after the end of communism, the war that was begun by U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush in 1990 just as the Soviet Union and its military alliance the Warsaw Pact were ending, and the United States and its military alliance North Atlantic Treaty Organisation continued and has since expanded right up to Russia’s very borders – the equivalent of Russia’s Warsaw Pact having absorbed Mexico or Canada and placed nuclear missiles right on America’s own border. The violence has killed more than 250,000 people and displaced millions, sparking a refugee crisis in Europe. Treating people differently because of race or religion, he said, would be a “betrayal of our values”. “We’ve made a few bad decisions subsequent to that attack in part based on fear, and that’s why we have to be cautious”. Enacting restrictions that effectively prevent refugees from being admitted to the USA isn’t a solution, he said.
Advertisement
The White House has signaled an openness to what it deems more constructive changes to the administration’s refugee program, but Mr. Obama didn’t specify what proposals he would support.
