President Obama Calls ISIS Fight “A Generational Struggle”

“Here in the United States, we have seen all kinds of home-grown terrorism and tragically recent history reminds us how even a single individual motivated by a hateful ideology with access to risky weapons can inflict horrendous harm on Americans”, Mr. Obama said.

“This will not be quick”.

Although ISIL calls itself the “Islamic State”, the President has emphasized that the terrorist group is neither Islamic nor a state. “We’re not going to eat our seed corn by devoting too much money on things we don’t need now and robbing ourselves of the capacity to make sure that we’re prepared for future threats”.

The president’s meeting with Pentagon brass came a month after he angered some top military officials by saying that they had no strategy yet for training and equipping Iraqi security forces.

Concerned about the ability of Iraqi security forces to fight the extremists, Obama announced this summer that he would send 450 additional troops to help train and assist local fighters in the capital of Anbar province, where Islamic State militants have dealt embarrassing blows to the Iraqi central government.

Obama said more than 5,000 air strikes had been carried out against the group, eliminating “thousands of fighters, including senior ISIL commanders”. ISIL is now in control of about half the country. It has no air force.

“Our approach recognizes that no quantity of military force will finish the terror that is ISIL unless it is matched by a broader work, political and financial, that addresses the underlying situations that have permitted ISIL to achieve traction”, he added.

“ISIL’s strategic weaknesses are real”, Obama said, noting it has no air force and no support from any nation. “It relies on fear, sometimes executing its own disillusioned fighters”.

He said the USA will keep up efforts to discredit the group and counter its use of the Internet to recruit suppporters. “As with any military effort, there will be periods of progress, but there are also going to be some setbacks”.

Obama expressed the US concern that upon the elimination of ISIS, that the regions controlled by the group not fall into a power vacuum. President MuhammaduBuhari said the government will defend Nigerians’ right to worship freely.

In response to a question, Obama said sending United States troops to fight ISIS was not discussed at Monday’s Pentagon briefing.

Under the current US strategy, the US troops deployed to Iraq all are confined to bases, stations and the US Embassy, thus keeping them largely out of harm’s way. The group’s ideological focus has been to go after Shi’ites, whom they consider heretics and apostates, while also killing Coptic Christians in Egypt, Druze in Syria, and Yazidis in Iraq.

“A speech isn’t a strategy”, said Cory Fritz, press secretary for House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) after Mr. Obama’s remarks.

Obama noted that the difficulty of preventing small-scale attacks by “lone wolves” within the U.S. homeland despite success at preventing large attacks since the September 11, 2001 assaults on New York and Washington.

Currently, IS is “dug into the civilian population”, Obama said.