After a week-long campaign for international support for his operation against ISIS at the UN assembly and a week after the US-led airstrikes in Syria and Iraq started; President Barack Obama of the United States confessed the US intelligence miscalculated the ISIS threats in a televised interview aired Sunday.
With his ongoing campaign and attack missions in Iraq and Syria, legislators however had continued to probe Obama's strategy for destroying the Islamic State militants.
In a broadcasted interview with 60 Minutes, US President Barack Obama admitted that the US intelligence underestimated terrorizations that might transpire from the disastrous Syrian civil war. He also said that ISIS was more potent that the preliminary thoughts of the US.
The president also admitted that the US had laid too much confidence in the Iraqi military before comprehending that it was out of shape to battle Islamic State militants that besieged Iraqi troops in much of northern and western Iraq in mid-June.
Resonating sentimentalities also expressed by the US intelligence services head James Clapper, President Obama said that the administration has miscalculated what had been taking place in Syria's civil war, allowing the nation to turn into a target for ISIS jihadists worldwide.
Through a recorded CBS' 60 Minutes interview, the US president said that the extremists were miscellanies of Iraq's Al-Qaeda network, which once weakened by US forces, went back underground. Obama added, "Over the past couple of years, during the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swaths of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos."
President Obama subsequently added that the US also overestimated the security forces of Iraq, which were promptly blocked by ISIS when it seized Mosul's northern city this summer. The president accentuated that the concern in Iraq is not simply a military issue but rather a political one.
US President Barack Obama stated on his interview that America is leading the global community to support a nation that they have a security allegiance with, to ensure that they capable of taking care of their businesses. He also added, "If we do our job right and the Iraqis fight, then over time our role can slow down and taper off."
In a 2013 New Yorker interview, President Obama referred ISIS and other militant groups as "JV squads" before reconsidering those remarks earlier this year. This August, the US instigated to blast ISIS in Iraq and launched airstrikes against them in Syria earlier this month, alongside other Arab allies.
In June, ISIS started taking the spotlight globally when the group poured over Iraq's Syrian border and apprehended huge swaths of western and northern Iraq. Since then, the extremists have broadcasted their barbarousness by uploading videos of decapitation of American and British hostages, which has intensified American interest in the region and stimulated support for airstrikes against the group in both Iraq and Syria.
Because of his admission, President Barack Obama might plot new strategies against notorious terrorist organization, ISIS. But retributions and reprisals are still dreaded not only in Iraq and Syria but all over the world where these vicious insurgents can cause a lethal pandemonium.
