US underestimated ISIS threat

President Barack Obama has said that US intelligence agencies underestimated so called Islamic State (ISIS) activity inside Syria, which has become “ground zero” for jihadist terrorists worldwide, while overestimating the ability of the Iraqi army to fight such militant groups.

The president's words, extracted from a CBS interview, came as further US-led airstrikes were carried out in Syria and Iraq and John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, called for a ground war against ISIS. The interview, for the 60 Minutes programme, was taped on Friday.

Citing comments by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, to the Washington Post earlier this month, Obama said US intelligence underestimated what had been taking place in Syria after Islamic militants went underground when US marines defeated al-Qaeda in Iraq with help from Iraqi tribes.

“But 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,” Obama said. “And so this became ground zero for jihadists around the world.”

Clapper was quoted by the Post as saying: “I didn't see the collapse of the Iraqi security force in the north coming. I didn't see that.”

ISIS controls large areas of Syria and northern Iraq and has killed thousands of people. The beheadings of two American journalists and one British aid worker by Isis militants have shocked the world.

US air strikes on Iraq began on 8 August, and more than 200 have since been carried out. Strikes on Syria, by a coalition which includes Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, began on last Tuesday.

In Syria, the raids have increasingly targeted oil and other economic infrastructure that funds the jihadists as well as military targets.

Despite continued air strikes by the US-led coalition, Jihadist fighters yesterday closed in to within only a few kilometres of a key Kurdish town on Syria's border with Turkey .

Meanwhile, Nato member Turkey's government said it would ask parliament to debate joining the coalition against the jihadists operating on the country's doorstep from as early as Thursday.

During Sunday night, coalition warplanes hit targets around the IS-held town of Minbej, including a complex of grain silos and a mill that the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said was being operated by civilians. The group said there were initial reports of civilian casualties in the raid, but no confirmed toll.

The coalition also struck the entrance of the country's main gas plant in the eastern city of Deir Ezzor in an apparent warning to IS militants to abandon the facility.

In Iraq, ISIS fighters are reportedly just one mile away from Baghdad.

"The Islamic State are now less than 2km away from entering Baghdad," a spokesperson of Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East said.