United States plans coalition meeting on battle against ISIS

U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Sunni nations must do more to support the U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State terrorists in Iraq and Syria, offering his most direct public criticism of inaction by Gulf allies such as Saudi Arabia.

Speaking Thursday at École Militaire, a military war college in Paris, Carter said IS uses the Internet “to give encouragement or even instruction to people who have already been radicalized, or radicalizing some of these poor lost souls who sit in front of a screen and fantasize about a life as a jihadi”.

Carter and French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian co-chaired a meeting with counterparts from Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, with United States officials presenting the plan to eject the jihadist fighters from their headquarters in Raqqa, Syria and Mosul, Iraq, and to maintain that planned defeat. “I mean, I think that’s in the category that the president has indicated wherever there’s additional opportunity to make a difference, according to the strategy, we’d be willing to do that”.

“They want to go back and take their homelands, and we want to support them in doing that”, he said. Of those, the United States has carried out the majority, with 4,361 Iraq and 3,029 in Syria.

USA military leaders say the coalition is gaining ground on the Islamic State, and they hope the six core nations can encourage others to contribute.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss publicly the private conversation.

Around 22,000 jihadists have been killed by the US-led coalition fighting the ISIS group since mid-2014, France’s own defense minister said on Thursday. For this to work, the coalition’s new military campaign plan involves putting boots on the ground in the form of special forces.

The casualty statistics suggest that the air campaign has become more lethal as U.S.-backed Iraqi ground forces have grown more aggressive, and coordination with coalition teams conducting the airstrikes has improved.

U.S. officials have declined to set a timeline for what could be a long-term campaign that also requires political reconciliation to ultimately succeed. Russian Federation argues it is attacking IS and other terrorist groups.

“The Russians are on the wrong track strategically and also in some cases tactically”, Carter said. “It is for that reason that we have agreed to organise this larger meeting in a few weeks”, Mr Carter explained.

Carter announced a meeting next month of defence ministers from all 26 military members of the anti-Islamic State coalition, as well as Iraq, in what he described as the first face-to-face meeting of its kind.

The Obama administration has acknowledged it is sending up to 50 Special Operations forces to secret locations in the war-ravaged Middle East nation.