Obama, Hollande pledge solidarity against Islamic State

“By failing to countenance use of (U.S.) ground troops to fight ISIS, the president is (consigning) even more people to death when the next ISIS terrorist attack hits, perhaps in the United States”.

Hollande said in Moscow Paris was ready to increase its support for groups fighting Islamic State on the ground.

However, the two men remained at odds over the fate of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Russian Federation whom Western and Sunni Arab countries blame for Syria’s almost five-year civil war and want removed from power.

The Russian leader said, under the cooperation already established with the U.S.-led coalition, Russia’s military had passed on details of the flight plan of the jet that was shot down this week.

But while Milbank complained about Obama’s more measured response to the issues, fellow Washington Post columnist David Ignatius on Wednesday’s “Morning Joe” program on MSNBC said that he had a different reaction entirely to Obama’s appearance, calling it “entirely appropriate”. He expects the United States to play a major role in this war.

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

Eleven days after the bloody attacks in France (130 dead and 350 injured), MM.

“We need to take the lead so that there can be actions against terrorism that must be intensified”, he told Putin at the start of their talks in the Kremlin.

“My top priority is going to be to ensure that this does not escalate”, Obama said.

In a call, Obama and Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan “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.

“We stand in solidarity with Turkey and support the territorial integrity of our North Atlantic Treaty Organisation ally”, Stoltenberg said.

“Russia right now is a coalition of two – Iran and Russian Federation – supporting Assad”, Obama said. Every time Assad attacks his own citizens, Obama says, it drives more people into the arms of ISIS. 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.

Germany, for its part, faces parliamentary and constitutional constraints on striking ISIS militarily but is poised to boost its training support for the Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq and will send forces to Mali to support a United Nations peacekeeping mission and to relieve pressure on France, which had been carrying much of the burden of anti-terrorist efforts there. The best example was the Russian assault on the oil pipeline, if you will, the trucks that haul the oil out of Syria which allows the money to keep running, pouring into the Islamic State (Daesh) coffers.

Cameron believes that if Russia, France, and his country will all decide to join the U.S.-led coalition, a strengthened and highly offensive military move should be made in order to relieve the people of “the very direct threat that (ISIS) poses to our country and our way of life”.