The United States admitted yesterday that the Islamic State is the most dangerous group it has faced in recent years, and warned that the Middle East faces a long drawn battle to defeat it.
Pentagon chiefs said, “the militant group could be eradicated if local Sunni communities reject it and regional powers unite to fight it, but only if the battle is taken into Syria and not just Iraq”.
Speaking after the US military revealed it had already carried out a failed hostage rescue mission inside Syria, and against the backdrop of new air strikes in Iraq, they warned IS terrorist group.
“They marry ideology and a sophistication of strategic and tactical military prowess,” Defense Secretary Chuch Hagel said about the “barbaric” militants. “They are tremendously well funded. This is beyond anything we have seen.”
General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the group “has an apocalyptic end of days strategic vision that will eventually have to be defeated.”
Dempsey warned the militants vision of a wider Muslim caliphate could “fundamentally alter the face of the Middle East and create a security environment that would certainly threaten us in many ways.”
“Can they be defeated without addressing that part of the organization that resides in Syria? The answer is no,” he said, when asked if the campaign against the group could go beyond Iraq.
He spoke of a “very long contest” that could not be won by US military prowess alone, but only with regional support and that of “the 20 million disenfranchised Sunnis that happen to reside between Damascus and Baghdad.”
It is feared that the more then ten thousand foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq will inevitably return home and launch terror attacks in their native countries.
