Obama says U.S. underestimated Islamic State

PanARMENIAN.Net - President Barack Obama has acknowledged that U.S. agencies underestimated the threat posed by the Islamist insurgency in Syria, BBC News reports.

In a TV interview, he said that alQaeda had been beaten in Iraq by U.S. forces working with Sunni tribes. But they took advantage of the power vacuum in neighboring Syria to emerge as Isis, later called Islamic State.

Meanwhile, there has been fierce fighting to the west of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

The BBC says Islamist militants were held off by government troops with the help of air strikes by the U.S.-led coalition. However, the insurgents have not retreated and some are less than 10km (six miles) from the city.

In an interview with the CBS TV program 60 Minutes, Obama said Syria had become a "ground zero" for militants who had been able to take advantage of the chaos there.

He reiterated that only part of the solution to defeating them would be military and that a political solution was also necessary.

"During the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swathes of the country completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos and attract foreign fighters... who believed in their jihadist nonsense," he said.

President Obama said the jihadists had gained a military capacity by absorbing remnants of Saddam Hussein's old army in Iraq.

Obama noted that his director of national intelligence, James Clapper, had acknowledged that the US had "underestimated what had been taking place in Syria".

Asked whether the U.S. had also overestimated the ability or will of Iraq's US-trained military to fight the jihadists, Obama said: "That's true. That's absolutely true."

He said a political solution was key, one that would arise out of an accommodation between Sunni and Shia populations.

A U.S.-led coalition of Arab and Western states has begun an air campaign to help counter Islamic State (IS), striking targets in Iraq and Syria.

Iraq has remained unstable since the departure of U.S. troops, with the Sunni population largely alienated by the former Shia-led government. Syria has been engulfed in a civil war since 2011.

Over the weekend, U.S.-led coalition aircraft targeted four makeshift oil refineries under IS control in Syria, as well as a command center. U.S. Central Command said that early indications were that the attacks by U.S., Saudi and UAE planes were successful.