Hollande to press Obama on Russian Federation cooperation in

“For that’s how terrorists win”, President Barack Obama asserted at a joint news conference with his French counterpart Francois Hollande after they met at the White House to discuss the anti-ISIS mission.

Just over 10 days after terrorist attacks in Paris killed 130 people, Hollande arrived in Washington seeking to stitch together a tighter alliance against the Islamic State, which has claimed responsibility.

After the Paris attacks, Mr Hollande was seeking to forge a broader and more co-ordinated coalition to focus on the war on Islamic State in Syria.

“We decided, President Obama and myself, to scale up our strikes both in Syria and Iraq to broaden their scope, to strengthen our intelligence sharing regarding the targets we might aim at”, Hollande said.

As for Hollande, Mitchell mentioned that he told reporters the world “must act”, but “Turkey’s shoot down of the Russian plane” instead “derailed” “his hopes of drawing Obama and Vladimir Putin into a new coalition against ISIS”.

“US assistance has supported recent French strikes in Syria and we’re going to keep stepping up that coordination”, he said.

But so far, the United States has made it quite clear that working with Russian Federation would be hard if the two nations continue to bat for different teams.

US President Barack Obama said Turkey had “a right to defend its territory and its airspace” but cautioned against any escalation, while North Atlantic Treaty Organisation chief Jens Stoltenberg also called for calm.

The leaders’ talks in Washington came as Turkey’s downing of a Russian warplane at the Syrian border threatened to dramatically fan tensions in the volatile region. After weeks of waging a separate bombing campaign, mainly targeting Syrian rebels who don’t belong to the Islamic State, Russia began striking the extremist group in earnest after a bomb brought down a Russian passenger plane last month, killing all 224 on board.

“As Francois said, our humanitarian duty to help desperate refugees and our duty to security, those duties go hand in hand”, Obama said.

“The leaders agreed on the importance of de-escalating the situation and pursuing arrangements to ensure that such incidents do not happen again”, the White House said on Tuesday, referring to Obama’s telephone call to Erdogan.

“In that stadium, concert hall, restaurants and cafes we see our own”, Obama said.

“Viva la France”, Obama added.

A second senior French official said Paris was under no illusion that getting Putin to coordinate more closely would be easy.

Russia’s increasingly large role in the Syrian civil war would get even bigger if the US became an ally, but that’s become increasingly unlikely because of civilian casualties.

But Turkey’s downing of a Russian warplane has created problems for both France and the United States.

In advance of Hollande’s meeting with Putin, France sought to dismiss concerns that it might soften its stance on worldwide sanctions against Russian Federation over Ukraine in exchange for Russia’s cooperation in the fight against the Islamic State.

“I don’t think the approach is sufficient to the job”, Feinstein said on CBS’ “Face the Nation”.