NEWPORT, Wales — President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron pressed fellow NATO leaders Thursday to confront the “brutal and poisonous” Islamic State militant group that is wreaking havoc in Iraq and Syria — and urged regional partners Jordan and Turkey to join the effort.
NEWPORT, Wales — President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron pressed fellow NATO leaders Thursday to confront the “brutal and poisonous” Islamic State militant group that is wreaking havoc in Iraq and Syria — and urged regional partners Jordan and Turkey to join the effort.
As leaders of the Western alliance gathered for a two-day summit, Obama and Cameron worked to begin forming a coalition of nations that could combat the extremists through military power, diplomatic pressure and economic penalties.
“Those who want to adopt an isolationist approach misunderstand the nature of security in the 21st century,” they wrote in a joint editorial published as the meetings began. “Developments in other parts of the world, particularly in Iraq and Syria, threaten our security at home.”
While some NATO leaders talked tough about the threat posed by the Islamic State group, the alliance made no specific pledges of action. NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he believed the broader international community “has an obligation to stop the Islamic State from advancing further” and would seriously consider requests for assistance, particularly from the Iraqi government.
The Islamic State group moved up the list of international priorities as the militants pressed through Iraq with lightning speed earlier this year. The group, which seeks to create a caliphate, or Islamist nation-state, in the Mideast, is considered even more merciless toward its enemies than the al-Qaida terror network, and intelligence officials across the world warn that with hundreds of Westerners fighting for them, it may soon seek to seed its violence beyond its declared borders.
The U.S. began launching airstrikes against militant targets in Iraq last month, with Britain joining American forces in humanitarian airdrops to besieged minority populations. The militants’ killing of two American journalists inside Syria has raised discussion of targeting the group there as well.
White House officials said they did not expect NATO to commit to a military mission against the group during the summit. Still, they raised the prospect that the end of NATO’s combat mission in Afghanistan — an effort that has consumed the alliance for more than a decade — could allow member states to focus their attention elsewhere.
“What you see the alliance doing at this summit is looking at more than one direction at a time,” said Douglas Lute, the U.S. ambassador to NATO.