Obama met with the US defence team and military chiefs of 21 allies at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland on Tuesday against a backdrop of recent gains by ISIS around Kobane in northern Syria and Anbar province of western Iraq.
“This is an operation that involves the world against ISIL,” Obama said. “There are going to be periods of progress and setbacks.”
Coalition members are “united in our goal” of defeating ISIS, which is also known as ISIL, he added.
Allies have blunted ISIS advances on Erbil, Mosul dam and Sinjar in a “long-term campaign” against extremists, Obama said. His critics point to recent ISIS gains on Hit in western Iraq and Kobane in Syria, a holdout Kurdish town near the Turkish border.
Coalition aircraft intensified attacks around Kobane with 21 strikes on ISIS trucks, compounds, mortar positions and artillery on Monday and Tuesday, helping the town’s besieged Kurdish defenders end their losing streak against ISIS.
“We certainly do not want the town to fall,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Tuesday. “At the same time, our capacity to prevent that town from falling is limited by the fact that air strikes can only do so much.”
Military chiefs from Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Iraq, Italy, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Netherlands, New Zealand, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Britain attended the meeting.
It took place amid a rift between Washington and its only NATO-ally in the region, Turkey, which faces sustained US pressure to train and equip Syrian fighters and allow coalition aircraft to attack ISIS from its air base at Incirlik.
Najat Abdullah, from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) office in the US, said Kurdish officials were not at the talks but that Peshmerga forces are co-operating with US military advisors in the fightback against ISIS in Iraq’s Nineveh, Kirkuk and Diyala provinces.
“With ISIS having captured heavy, US-made weapons from the collapsed Iraqi security forces in Mosul and elsewhere, the Peshmerga are substantially outgunned,” he told Rudaw. “The Peshmerga will need heavy, armour-defeating munitions and armoured vehicles.”
Hawar Shawki, a spokesman for the Kurdish National Congress of North America (KNC), warned that US-led airstrikes may not stop Kobane falling to ISIS, a sectarian militia that controls swathes of Sunni-majority areas on either side of the Iraq-Syria border.
“The KNC wants the international community including the US to send arms and increase military support for the Kurdish armed forces in Syria to help them combat the ISIS threat,” he told Rudaw. “Unless this is done, the world will witness a humanitarian disaster on a grand scale.”
