US “underestimated” the power of of Iraqi Army

US President Barack Obama speaks at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's 44th Annual Legislative Conference Phoenix Awards Dinner in Washington on September 27, 2014. (Photo: AFP - Nicholas Kamm)

Published Monday, September 29, 2014

US President Barack Obama admitted Sunday that the United States had underestimated the opportunity that a collapsing Syria would provide for jihadist militants to regroup and stage a sudden comeback.

Speaking to CBS News, the president said that former al-Qaeda fighters driven from Iraq by US and local forces had been able to gather in Syria to form the newly dangerous Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) group.

A US-led coalition of Arab and Western allies has begun an air campaign against the group, hitting targets in Iraq and Syria, which Obama called "ground zero for jihadists around the world."

ISIS has killed thousands while seizing parts of Syria and northwestern Iraq to form a self-declared “caliphate.”

"I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,"

Obama said, referring to his director of national intelligence.

Clapper told a Washington Post columnist this month that US intelligence had underestimated ISIS and overestimated Iraq's army.

"I didn't see the collapse of the Iraqi security force in the north coming," Clapper was quoted as saying. "I didn't see that. It boils down to predicting the will to fight, which is an imponderable."

Asked whether Washington has also overestimated the ability or will of Iraq's US-trained military to fight the jihadists on its own, Obama said:

"That's true. That's absolutely true."

The US leader made his comments in an interview with the "60 Minutes" news show taped on Friday.

Islamic militants went underground when US Marines supposedly quashed al-Qaeda in Iraq, he said.

"But over the past couple of years, during the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swaths of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos," Obama said.

Obama said he recognized the contradiction in opposing the rule of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad while battling ISIS militants who have been fighting Assad's government.

"For Syria to remain unified, it is not possible that Assad presides over that entire process," Obama said. "On the other hand, in terms of immediate threats to the United States, ISIL, Khorasan Group, those folks could kill Americans."

The US says it has hit a group called "Khorasan" in Syria in the past week, but experts and Syria's so called "moderate" opposition argue it actually struck al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, al-Nusra Front, which fights alongside the Syria rebels.

Obama said ISIS members have become "very savvy" in their use of social media, and had lured new recruits "who believed in their jihadist nonsense" from Europe, America and Australia, as well as from Muslim majority countries.

The US president said that part of the solution would be for Syria and Iraq to resolve their domestic political crises. He did not specify how international airstrikes would help.

Obama outlined the military goal against ISIS:

"We just have to push them back, and shrink their space, and go after their command and control, and their capacity, and their weapons, and their fueling, and cut off their financing, and work to eliminate the flow of foreign fighters."

An enduring solution, Obama said, would require

"a change in how not just Iraq, but countries like Syria and some of the other countries in the region, think about what political accommodation means."

He added:

"The Iraqis have to be willing to fight. And they have to be willing to fight in a nonsectarian way – Shia, Sunni, and Kurd – alongside each other against this cancer in their midst."

Obama said some countries in the region

"have now created an environment in which young men are more concerned whether they're Shia or Sunni, rather than whether they are getting a good education or whether they are able to, you know, have a good job."

When it comes to Iraq, Obama claimed that the US left Iraqis

"with a democracy that was intact, a military that was well-equipped and the ability then to chart their own course."

However, he added

"that opportunity was squandered over the course of five years or so because the prime minister, [Nouri al-]Maliki, was much more interested in consolidating his Shia base."

Obama did not address how sectarianism in Iraq was directly fueled and encouraged by the Americans during their occupation of the country.

"We are assisting Iraq in a very real battle that's taking place on their soil, with their troops," Obama said.

"It is in our interest to do that, because ISIL represents sort of a hybrid of not just the terrorist network, but one with territorial ambitions, and some of the strategy and tactics of an army," he said, using an alternate name for ISIS.

Iraq has remained divided since the 2003 US invasion and the withdrawal of American troops in 2011, and Syria has been in full-blown civil war since 2011.

"This is not America against ISIL," Obama said. "

This is America leading the international community to assist a country with whom we have a security partnership with, to make sure that they are able to take care of their business."

(AFP, Reuters, Al-Akhbar, Anadolu)

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