Barack Obama says ISIS being hit ‘harder than ever’

“The point is, Isil leaders can not hide and our next message to them is simple: “You are next”. Obama also said the USA strategy of hunting down leaders, training forces and stopping the group’s financing and propaganda is progressing. At the same time, the president said the US coalition has ramped up its bombing campaign, and local ground forces have pushed ISIS back in both Iraq and Syria.

Sounding a drastically more strident tone, Obama stated on Monday that the united states and its allies have been taking the fight to Islamic nation extremists in Iraq and Syria, however admitted that progress had to come faster.

At the end of his speech, the president said he was sending secretary of defense Ashton Carter to the middle east to discuss the latest efforts with partner forces.

“We are hitting ISIL harder than ever”, said Mr Obama, in a second address following the seemingly ISIS-influenced attack in San Bernardino, California that has raised questions about his strategy.

The pace of airstrikes against IS targets had accelerated, Obama said, with more bombs dropped in November than in any month since the first worldwide action began in August 2014.

On Thursday, the president will visit the National Counterterrorism Center in Virginia where he is expected to receive a briefing and then speak.

According to the president, key members of the group’s leadership have been taken out by the coalition.

But Obama said his administration is “moving forward with a great sense of urgency” against the militants.

USA officials have insisted there are no specific, credible threats to the United States.

President Barack Obama, accompanied by Defence Secretary Ash Carter and Commander of US Central Command General Lloyd Austin, at the Pentagon on Monday.

The president hopes to resolve the four and a half year conflict between embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad and those fighting for his ouster – a war that has become a proxy battle between Sunni and Western powers against Russian Federation and Iran in support of Assad – in order to focus the world’s war effort on its shared enemy, Islamic State. With a backdrop of Muslim immigration dominating the presidential campaign trail, the president will also attend a naturalization ceremony Tuesday at the National Archives. Obama planned to use that occasion to reframe the national conversation about immigrants around the country’s founding values of tolerance and freedom.