Obama, Hollande pledge joint struggle against IS

PanARMENIAN.Net - Pledging solidarity after the Paris attacks,U.S. President Barack Obama promised Tuesday, November 24, to work with France and other allies to intensify the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State, saying America would not be cowed by the scourge of terrorism, the Associated Press reports.

To this point, Obama said, Russia is an "outlier" in the fight.

"We cannot and we will not succumb to fear," Obama said, standing alongside French President Francois Hollande after they met at the White House to discuss the anti-ISIS mission. "Make no mistake, we will win, and groups like ISIL will lose."

Hollande's trip to Washington was part of a diplomatic push to get the U.S. and other nations to bolster efforts to destroy the militant group that has claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks. Hollande emerged from his meeting with Obama saying that France and the United States had agreed to step up a "joint response," including new efforts to target terrorists' financial networks, take back IS-controlled territory, scale up efforts in Syria and Iraq and increase intelligence sharing.

The U.S. and France "share the determination to fight terrorism anywhere," Hollande said, through a translator, according to the AP.

The French president had planned to urge Obama to work with Russia to build a new coalition to fight the extremists. But Hollande's mission quickly became entangled with the fallout from a Russian military plane downed by Turkey — an incident with echoes of the Cold War. The shootdown underscored what some see as a need for better coordination among the sprawling cast of interests engaged on the battlefields and in the skies above Iraq and Syria. At the same time, conflicting accounts and rising tensions stood to make any closer contact between interests more difficult.

Obama said, "We've got a coalition of 65 countries. Russia right now is a coalition of two — Iran and Russia supporting Assad."