'Core coalition' to fight Islamic State just the start for US administration
US strategy to combat Islamic State extremists requires an unenviable to-do list of Middle East diplomacy and deeper US military involvement
The US-led international strategy to combat Islamic State that President Barack Obama sketched out on Friday is likely to require years of thorny diplomacy and deeper US military involvement in conflicts that he has struggled to avoid.
Obama's remarks at the end of a Nato summit in Wales offered the administration's most in-depth explanation of how it plans to fight Islamic State, the transnational extremist group that has seized an area as large as Jordan straddling the dividing line between Syria and Iraq.
The nascent strategy calls for working with European and Arab allies to confront the group not only in Iraq, where the US is conducting air strikes to assist government-aligned fighters, but also in Syria, where the US has failed to fulfil its promise to help build a moderate rebel force.
Obama hailed the formation of a "core coalition" of 10 countries - led by the US and including the UK, France and Australia - focused on destroying Islamic State. But only one Muslim nation, Turkey, is included. US Secretary of State John Kerry will now travel to the Middle East to build more support.
"We are going to have to find effective partners on the ground to push back against ISIL," Obama said, using his government's acronym for Islamic State and referring specifically to its sanctuary in Syria. "The moderate coalition there is one that we can work with. We have experience working with many of them. They have been, to some degree, outgunned and outmanned, and that's why it's important for us to work with our friends and allies to support them more effectively."
There was little fanfare to his announcement, which comes just a week after his controversial admission that there was no US strategy to fight Islamic State in Syria. US officials still appear to be keeping expectations low, an acknowledgment of the fraught negotiations and unpalatable options that come with enlisting Middle Eastern powers, already warring among themselves, to rally around a common cause of defeating the Islamic State.
