Coalition looks to ramp up fight
Defence ministers from the US-led coalition striking the Islamic State group met yesterday in a bid to engineer a decisive new phase in what has become a difficult fight with no end in sight.
Pentagon chief Ashton Carter convened the Brussels summit to persuade partner nations to contribute more to the campaign against the extremists, who despite 18 months of air strikes remain firmly in control of large parts of Iraq and Syria and have a growing foothold in Libya.
Further complicating the situation is Russia's own air campaign in Syria, which Moscow insists is also targeting IS, but which the West says is in fact aimed at rebels opposed to President Bashar al-Assad.
The summit marks the culmination of weeks of work for Carter, who has taken a two-pronged approach to winning broader support from coalition members.
While he has written to each one privately, he has also publicly accused some unspecified members of the 66-nation coalition of doing "nothing at all" to help the fight.
The effort has dealt some significant blows to the jihadists: the Pentagon estimates IS has lost about 40 percent of the territory it once held in Iraq, and about 10 percent in Syria.
But despite losing control of the Iraqi city of Ramadi, assaults to recapture the key IS bastions of Mosul in Iraq and its self-proclaimed capital in Syria's Raqa are still many months away, and thousands of IS fighters have streamed into Libya.
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