WASHINGTON: Support for the Islamic State organisation has grown since the US launched air strikes in Iraq and the group is attracting many new jihadist fighters, top US officials said yesterday.
The IS group’s “widespread use of social media and growing online support intensified following the commencement of US airstrikes in Iraq,” FBI head James Comey told the House Homeland Security Committee.
The number of jihadist fighters in Syria and Iraq is now between 20,000 and 31,000, said Matthew Olsen, who leads the National Counterterrorism Center.
Olsen said the Islamic State group had “very sophisticated propaganda” which “exceeds” that from other groups. “It’s likely to have a potential impact on recruits,” he said. After the recent beheadings of two American hostages and a British man, Comey said the Islamic State group and “other foreign terrorist organisations may continue to try to capture American hostages in an attempt to force the US government and people into making concessions that would only strengthen (IS) and further its terrorist operations.”
But intelligence services had no information the Islamic State group was plotting an attack inside the United States, Olsen said. Since August 8, American forces have launched 167 raids against jihadist targets in Iraq.
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama insisted yesterday that US troops have no combat mission in Iraq, after his top general suggested some US advisers could join Iraqi forces to fight the Islamic State group.
“The American forces that have been deployed to Iraq do not and will not have a combat mission,” Obama told American troops at the headquarters of US Central Command in Florida.
Obama has repeatedly stressed that, despite ordering air strikes against IS in Syria and Iraq, he will not send US troops back to fight another land war in the region. Indeed, he has based much of the rationale of his presidency on getting American forces out of foreign entanglements.
But his remarks yesterday were lent added relevance by comments by General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Tuesday.
Dempsey said that it may at some point prove necessary to send US advisers into action with the Iraqi troops battling IS, in what he called “close-combat advising”. But the White House insisted the idea of US troops in battle was a “purely hypothetical scenario.”
It was not immediately clear whether Obama’s comments in Florida precluded such an approach, but there appeared to be plenty of rhetorical space for Dempsey’s scenario to play out while allowing the president to insist that American troops have no dedicated combat mission.
The president did not repeat the frequent US characterisation of the evolving mission in Iraq and Syria that there will be no US “boots on the ground” — a term usually seen to refer to combat troops. Obama’s short remarks at the rain drenched MacDill air force base also included a defence of his own foreign policy — which Republicans argue is collapsing around him.
He noted that he had brought US combat troops home from Iraq, refocused the US war in Afghanistan and would “responsibly” end combat operations in the country before the end of the year.
He also recalled the US operation to kill Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his policy of taking out the “core” leadership of Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The president however stressed that in the new conflict to “degrade” and “destroy” America would not go it alone and talked up the international coalition he is building. Obama said France and Britain were already flying with the United States over Iraq, added that Australia and Canada would send military advisors to the country. He noted Saudi Arabia’s willingness to base a US mission to train moderate Syrian rebels on its soil and said German paratroopers were also going to take part in a training mission which he did not specify.
Obama made his speech after meeting General Lloyd Austin, who runs US Central Command, which stretches across the troubled belt of South and Central Asia and the Middle East. He also sat down in closed door talks with military representatives of 40 nations which are expected to take part in the anti-IS mission.
A former US Army Chief of Staff said yesterday that air strikes alone will not be enough to destroy Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria, and Baghdad will need training to rebuild ground forces capable of “going after them and rooting them out,” General Ray Odierno, who commanded US troops in Iraq from 2008 to 2010, said it was the sectarian bias of Iraq’s army rather than any failings in US training that had led Iraqi forces to collapse against the Islamic State onslaught.
Agencies
