Hollande, Obama Meeting To Focus On Bolstering Fight Against Islamic State

Hollande said he would bring that message to Moscow, where he is to meet with Putin later this week. He also described it as a “conference on life” as he urged his compatriots not to let the Paris attacks intimidate them or their spirit.

“I reject identifying migration and terrorism”, Hollande said.

President Barack Obama is offering a harsh assessment of Russia’s role as he addresses the global effort to fight the Islamic State.

Obama and Hollande were both asked if they could set a deadline for Assad’s exit. “And we must do it together”, Obama said.

While Obama would not need to depart from his line that Assad must go, he could agree to de-emphasize a USA push for that happen soon to accommodate the Russian position.

Obama spoke Tuesday during a joint news conference with French President Francois Hollande (frahn-SWAH’ oh-LAWND’).

Obama said, “Turkey, like every country, has a right to defend its territory and its air space”.

He said the encounter also “underscores the importance of our moving the political track along as quickly as possible” when it comes to resolving the Syrian civil war, which ISIS has exploited to seize territory.

In fact, the ISIS strikes on Paris reshaped the Hollande presidency in a similar way to how the al Qaeda strikes on NY and Washington awoke a slumbering administration in 2001 and made Bush into an activist commander-in-chief overnight.

Hollande and Obama huddled behind closed doors in the Oval Office, and neither offered any preview of their meeting to reporters at the session’s start.

Like Obama, Hollande said France would continue to provide air support and aid local forces but “won’t intervene on the ground”. The French leader is meeting other world leaders this week and will travel to Moscow to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Obama said Russian cooperation in the fight against the Islamic State would be “enormously helpful”.

“We will win and groups like ISIL will lose”, Obama said, using an acronym for Islamic State.

Hollande welcomed the USA show of unity, but suggested he was more interested in concrete actions than kind words.

“The USA has been conducting 80% or so of the airstrikes in Iraq and Syria and France has very importantly been the only European country to engage in airstrikes in Syria with us”, said Derek Chollet of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Obama slammed the notion of suspending the program, calling it “un-American”. He says this is an important moment for the USA and France as well as the rest of the world. “I want you to know that we will do everything in our power to prevent that”.

In the days since the Paris attacks, Obama had faced increased pressure at home and overseas to ramp up USA efforts to fight ISIS – calls that Obama has so far resisted.

Hollande arrived at the White House midmorning Tuesday. The visit has been complicated by Turkey’s shoot-down of a Russian warplane on Tuesday.

Hollande is trying to rally support this week for a more coordinated worldwide campaign to destroy Islamic State.