NEW YORK - US President Barack Obama’s decision to conduct surveillance flights on Islamic State forces in Syria has raised questions about Washington broadening its airstrike campaign against the jihadists in Iraq to targets in neighboring Syria.
White house spokesman Josh Earnest said on Tuesday that Obama has not made any decisions about launching military operations in Syria – a controversial move because it could necessitate cooperation with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“As a matter of US policy, we have not recognized” Assad as Syria’s leader, Earnest told journalists on the side-lines of a presidential trip. “There are no plans to change that policy and there are no plans to coordinate with the Assad regime.”
The US military has carried out aerial surveillance of IS for months and on August 8 launched air strikes against the al-Qaeda offshoot, which is also known as ISIS and ISIL and has declared a caliphate across swathes of territory it has seized from Syria and Iraq.
Washington is motivated by IS “threats facing our homeland and Western interests,” US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on Tuesday. “When it comes to the interests of the American people, we’re not going to ask for permission from the Syrian regime.”
“We don’t think that having a common enemy makes you a friend,” Psaki added, in response to a question from Rudaw.
On Monday evening, US officials revealed information about reconnaissance flights by drones and manned jets above Syria. Obama has resisted taking military action in Syria despite claims that eliminating IS will involve attacks on all the ground it controls.
Last week, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said IS would eventually need to be tackled on “both sides of what is essentially at this point a non-existent border” between Syria and Iraq. Such action would involve regional and European allies, his spokesman added.
While the Syrian government has said it will work with foreign powers to defeat IS, Western governments have so far rejected any collaboration with Assad, who is accused of gas attacks and other atrocities during a three-and-a-half year uprising against his rule.
Oubai Shahbandar, an advisor to the Free Syria Foreign Mission in Washington, urged powers to reject Assad, assist the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and “defend the Syrian people from the terrorist menace” of IS, which recently turned its blitzkrieg holy war on Kurds and Christian minorities in Iraq.
“The Syrian opposition support efforts by the international community to strike Islamic State targets in northern and eastern Syria at a time that the FSA and the Syrian opposition are locked in a vicious battles against IS forces,” he told Rudaw.
US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel said he was working to "accelerate resupply efforts to the embattled Kurdish forces in northern Iraq". Seven US allies -- Albania, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, Italy, France, and Britain -- have so far pledged "urgently needed arms and equipment", he said in a statement on Tuesday.
Hagel’s fears that IS represents an “imminent threat” to the US are reflected by analysts. Graham Fuller, a former CIA official and author, said: “Such a movement cannot now be allowed, as a military force, to seize Baghdad or the Kurdish capital of Erbil.”
Gregory Gause, an expert with the Brookings Doha Center, said the rapid military gains of IS are rooted in a region-wide crisis of weak, failed and unpopular governments that struggle to deliver social services and control their borders.
