DEVELOPMENTS
— The U.N. refugee agency said about 70,000 Syrians have crossed into Turkey in the past 24 hours to escape fighting between Kurdish forces and the Islamic State group. A spokeswoman for the agency said most of those crossing the border are Kurdish women, children and elderly.
— Syria’s parliament speaker said Sunday that the U.S. should work with Damascus to battle the Islamic State extremist group rather than allying with nations that he accused of supporting terrorism. Speaker Jihad Laham was apparently referring to Saudi Arabia and other countries backing rebels trying to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad.
— French authorities filed preliminary charges against five people, including a sister and brother, suspected of belonging to a ring specialized in recruiting young female fighters for the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.
— Barbara Henning implored Islamic State militants to “see it in their hearts” to release her husband, a British aid worker being held hostage. The militants have threatened to kill former taxi driver Alan Henning next.
News services
The U.S.-led military campaign plan to retake Iraqi territory held by the Islamic State group calls for attacking the extremists from several directions simultaneously, and its success depends on getting more Arab help, the top American military officer said Sunday.
“We want them to wake up every day realizing that they are being squeezed from multiple directions,” said Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, referring to the Islamic State group, which also is known by the acronyms ISIL and ISIS.
“If we can get ISIL looking in about five different directions, that’s the desired end state,” he added in an interview with reporters traveling with him to Croatia from Lithuania, where he discussed Iraq and other issues with his NATO counterparts.
Dempsey stressed the importance of gaining more Arab participation in the U.S.-led effort, suggesting that without it the military campaign might not move to its next phase. He called wider Arab participation a prerequisite for President Barack Obama’s approval of the military campaign plan. Obama was briefed on the plan last week but has not approved it.
In an opinion column published Sunday in the Tampa Bay Times, Obama wrote, “This is not and will not be America’s fight alone. That’s why we continue to build a broad international coalition.” He said Arab countries have offered to help, but he mentioned none by name and did not describe their specific roles.
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, said the administration is pleased with its progress in building a coalition.
“The commitments are coming in every day,” she said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” However, she did not name individual Arab countries that have promised to participate in military action in Iraq, saying it was up to them to describe their own roles.
Obama’s signature on the military campaign plan for Iraq and Syria operations would move the effort into a new phase, Dempsey said, enabled by a larger number of coalition aircraft that would allow for a more persistent presence over the battlefields of Iraq and improved prospects for rebuilding key elements of the Iraqi army. Dempsey said last week that only about half of Iraqi army brigades, which originally were trained by the U.S., are suitable partners now for the U.S. On Sunday, he said one of the major problems with the other half is that they have been infiltrated by extremists.
Dempsey focused his comments on military action in Iraq rather than Syria.
“We want to go from being episodic with our offensive operations to sustained,” he said, adding that no one should expect a dramatic increase in airstrikes but rather a series of increases calculated to match Iraq’s ability to retake territory with its own ground forces. Obama has ruled out U.S. troops fighting another ground war in Iraq.
A number of Iraq’s Arab neighbors, including Jordan and Saudi Arabia, have said they support the U.S. effort but have not publicly committed to taking any offensive role in Iraq. France is the only ally that has joined thus far in airstrikes in Iraq.
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