REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
Obama at the White House in Washington on July 31.
US President Barack Obama will personally sign off on any airstrike targeting Islamic State militants in Syria, Julian Barnes and Carol Lee of The Wall Street Journal report.
With the high level of personal control in Syria, " Obama can better ensure the operation remain focused on his main goal for that part of the campaign: weakening the militants' hold on territory in neighboring Iraq," WSJ writes.
The US has conducted 174 strikes in Iraq and is preparing Islamic State (aka ISIS) targets in Syria. Obama has sent hundreds of special operations advisers to Iraq to assist Iraqi Security Forces and Kurdish peshmerga while asking Congress to grant the authority to train and arm vetted factions of the Syrian opposition.
Officials told The Journal that the commander-in-chief wanted "t o make sure the military actions in Syria are more like the counterterrorism operations in Somalia or Yemen."
REUTERS
Obama first detailed the "counterterrorism strategy" model last week, and NBC correspondent Richard Engel subsequently blasted the Somalia-Yemen comparison as an "oversimplification" and "wildly off-base" because both of the African governments cooperate with the US and American special forces on the ground.
"It's not at all the situation we are seeing in Iraq and Syria," Engel said, noting that Assad was a hostile adversary of the US. Furthermore, Iraq's government is heavily influenced by Iran, Assad's main backer.
In any case, it seems the US commander-in-chief is focused on ISIS while avoiding Assad. Obama said he would retaliate if US planes were targeted in Syria, but Secretary of State John Kerry said the U.S. would "communicate" with Assad's government to avoid any potential clashes.
Meanwhile, the US-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels fighting Assad are currently being bombed out of Aleppo, Syria's largest city and the last urban area in which the FSA has a significant presence, while ISIS continues to be largely left alone.
Even ISIS admits it's not being hit by air strikes; only FSA is. Again, no US plan to stop this: http://t.co/J0yUWLCoTf
— Michael Weiss (@michaeldweiss) September 18, 2014
And Washington has hinted that it wants the FSA to primarily fight ISIS as opposed to Assad. But the nationalist Syrian rebels are furious at this demand and have vowed to use any support provided to them against the brutal regime.
To understand rebel priorities, ask about origins of barrel bombs killing their children. (It's regime's Hama Airport, not ISIS's al-Raqqa.)