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Obama, After Airstrikes in Syria, Says U.S. Will ‘Take the Fight’ to ISIS
In Airstrikes, U.S. Targets Cell Said to Plot an Attack
(about 4 hours later)
WASHINGTON — President Obama on Tuesday hailed the American-led coalition that conducted airstrikes in Syria against the Islamic State, declaring, “We’re going to do what is necessary to take the fight to this terrorist group.”
WASHINGTON — American forces took advantage of the airstrikes against the Islamic State extremist group in Syria to try to simultaneously wipe out the leadership of an unrelated cell of veterans of Al Qaeda, who were said to be plotting an imminent attack against the United States or Europe, officials said Tuesday.
Speaking on the South Lawn of the White House, just before leaving for New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly, Mr. Obama said American planes had also struck targets of another militant group, Khorasan, and declared that there would be “no safe haven” for the group, which officials say is linked to Al Qaeda and has been plotting attacks against Americans.
The barrage of bombs and missiles launched into Syria early Tuesday was aimed primarily at crippling the Islamic State, the formidable Sunni organization that has seized a large piece of territory to form its own radical enclave. But the blitz also targeted a little-known network called Khorasan, in hopes of decapitating it before it could carry out what American officials feared would be a terrorist bombing in the West.
The United States already has bombed Islamic State targets in Iraq at that country’s request. But it did not seek permission to bomb the group in neighboring Syria.
American military and intelligence analysts were still studying damage reports from the initial air assault, but senior Obama administration officials expressed hope that they had killed Muhsin al-Fadhli, the leader of Khorasan and a onetime confidant of Osama bin Laden. The officials said they had been contemplating military action against Khorasan in recent months, but President Obama’s decision to hit the Islamic State’s forces inside Syria provided a chance to neutralize the other perceived threat.
The president emphasized that Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain had taken part in the air operation on Monday night.
Several officials said Khorasan had an advanced plan for an attack involving a bomb that could pass undetected through airport security systems, perhaps by lacing nonmetallic objects like toothpaste tubes and clothes with explosive material. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said the concerns about Khorasan were behind a decision last summer to ban uncharged laptop computers and cellphones from some United States-bound commercial airliners.
“America is proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with these nations on behalf of our common security,” Mr. Obama said. “The strength of this coalition makes clear to the world that this is not just America’s fight alone.”
The air campaign against Khorasan and the Islamic State got underway even as Mr. Obama flew to New York to meet with world leaders gathering for the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly. Mr. Obama did not seek United Nations permission for the military campaign, but he presented the strikes as the collaboration of a multinational coalition that included five Arab nations: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain.
The expansion of military action to Syria, as leaders of 180 countries are gathering at the United Nations, is very likely to galvanize a meeting that was already going to be dominated by Mr. Obama’s efforts to build a coalition for the fight against the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS or ISIL.
“Because of the almost unprecedented effort of this coalition, I think we now have an opportunity to send a very clear message that the world is united,” Mr. Obama said during a hastily arranged photo opportunity in New York with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi of Iraq, King Abdullah II of Jordan and representatives of the other Arab allies.
Ahead of that meeting, the United States moved quickly to justify the aerial attacks as legal. The American ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, told Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in a letter that such attacks were permitted under a fundamental principle in the United Nations Charter that gives countries the right to defend themselves, including using force on another country’s territory when that country is unwilling or unable to address it.
Still, the bulk of the military efforts were conducted by American forces, and reaction in the Middle East was mixed. President Hassan Rouhani of Iran, which is allied with the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, said the airstrikes were illegal because they were not conducted with the approval of Syria’s government, a point later echoed by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, another ally of Syria’s.
“The Syrian regime has shown that it cannot and will not confront these safe havens effectively itself,” the letter states. “Accordingly, the United States has initiated necessary and proportionate military actions in Syria in order to eliminate the ongoing ISIL threat to Iraq, including by protecting Iraqi citizens from further attacks and by enabling Iraqi forces to regain control of Iraq’s borders. In addition the United States has initiated military actions in Syria against Al Qaida elements in Syria known as the Khorasan Group to address terrorist threats that they pose to the United States and our partners and allies.”
The Syrian government itself seemed more accepting, probably because it was glad to see military power brought to bear against forces that have been fighting Mr. Assad and recently killed many of his soldiers. The Syrian Foreign Ministry said the government “backs any international effort that contributes to the fight against terrorists,” whether it is the Islamic State, the Nusra Front “or anyone else.”
Mr. Obama said he would meet with leaders from several countries in an effort to “cut off ISIL’s financing, to counter its hateful ideology, and to stop the flow of fighters into the region.”
Samantha Power, the American ambassador to the United Nations, informed her Syrian counterpart about the strikes ahead of time, but did not seek permission or disclose the timing or targets. “In fact, we warned them to not pose a threat to our aircraft,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, the president’s deputy national security adviser. Mr. Rhodes said Mr. Obama issued the order for the strikes on Thursday, a day after visiting the United States Central Command headquarters in Tampa that would carry out the operation.
The participation of five Arab countries in the operation will bolster the president’s argument that this campaign does not pit the United States against the Sunni Muslim world, but rather a broad coalition of Sunni Muslim and Western countries against a Sunni extremist group.
In his public appearances on Tuesday, Mr. Obama cautioned again that the campaign against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, would take time. He also cited the strike on Khorasan, the first time he has mentioned the group in public. “Once again, it must be clear to anyone who would plot against America and try to do Americans harm that we will not tolerate safe havens for terrorists who threaten our people,” he said at the White House before his departure for New York.
The air attacks were said to have scattered the jihadist forces and damaged facilities they have built in Syria that helped fuel their seizure of a large part of Iraq this year.
Most officials speaking publicly on Tuesday characterized the Khorasan threat as imminent. Lt. Gen. William C. Mayville Jr., who is in charge of operations for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, said the terrorist group was nearing “the execution phase of an attack either in Europe or the homeland.”
Separate from the attacks on the Islamic State, the United States Central Command, or Centcom, said that American forces acting alone “took action” against “a network of seasoned Al Qaeda veterans” from the Khorasan group in Syria to disrupt “imminent attack planning against the United States and Western interests.”
But one senior counterterrorism official, who insisted on anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said the group might not have chosen the target, method or even the timing for a strike. An intelligence official said separately that the group was “reaching a stage where they might be able to do something.”
Officials did not give any details about where or when those planned terrorist attacks were to have taken place.
Khorasan is closely allied with the Nusra Front, which is Al Qaeda’s designated affiliate in Syria, according to American intelligence officials. The group, they said, is made up of Qaeda operatives from places like Pakistan, Afghanistan, North Africa and Chechnya who have traveled to Syria on the orders of Ayman al-Zawahri, the Qaeda leader.
Al Qaeda cut ties with the Islamic State this year because the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, disobeyed orders from Al Qaeda to fight only in Iraq. Just days ago, American officials said the Khorasan group, led by a shadowy figure who was once in Osama bin Laden’s inner circle, had emerged in the past year as the Syria-based cell most intent on launching a terrorist attack on the United States or on its installations overseas.
Mr. Holder told Katie Couric of Yahoo News that the United States has followed the group for two years. “I can say that the enhanced security measures that we took” banning uncharged electronic devices on some flights were “based on concerns we had about what the Khorasan group was planning to do,” he said.
The White House had for some time been tracking a plot by Khorasan to conduct a terrorist attack in the United States, and that the planning had reached an “imminent” stage, Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, told reporters on Air Force One as the president was flying to New York.
The strikes on Tuesday were aimed at the group’s leaders, including Mr. Fadhli, a Kuwaiti associate of Bin Laden’s who moved to Syria last year. Officials said they were not certain if he had been killed, but Twitter accounts associated with jihadi groups said that he and another Khorasan leader, Abu Yusef al-Turki, had died in the airstrikes.
Mr. Rhodes said the United States had informed the Syrian government in advance of the airstrikes in recent days, though he emphasized there was no coordination with the government of President Bashar al-Assad and no advance warning on the timing or targets of specific strikes.
One Twitter user said that by killing Mr. Fadhli, the United States had “presented him a great wish and a most honorable gift” of martyrdom, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors militant groups’ social media postings.
The notification was relayed by the American ambassador to the United Nations, Ms. Power, to her Syrian counterpart. Mr. Rhodes did not characterize the Syrian response, and he reiterated that there would be no coordination on future strikes. “In fact, we warned them to not pose a threat to our aircraft,” he said.
Lawmakers and terrorism experts said that even if Mr. Fadhli had been killed, it would not necessarily derail the group’s ambitions. “Fadhli is certainly one of the most capable of the Al Qaeda core members,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, a California Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “His loss would be significant, but as we’ve seen before, any decapitation is only a short-term gain. The hydra will grow another head.”
Mr. Rhodes said the president authorized the strikes last Thursday, the day after he visited the headquarters of the United States Central Command in Tampa, Fla., which is running the operation. The timing, he said, was dictated by military planners and the readiness of other members of the coalition, rather than by diplomacy at the United Nations.
Congressional leaders largely rallied behind the strikes, including Republicans who oppose the president on most other issues, although some of them still faulted his strategy and many disagreed on whether he needed approval by lawmakers. The administration contends he does not need new action by Congress because of the authorization it passed targeting Al Qaeda and affiliates after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Pentagon officials characterized the offensive in Syria as “very successful,” and Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said on Tuesday morning that the strikes were “only the beginning” of a sustained campaign to destroy the Islamic State.
“ISIL is a direct threat to the safety and security of the United States and our allies,” the House speaker, John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, said in a statement. “I support the airstrikes launched by the president, understanding that this is just one step in what must be a larger effort to destroy and defeat this terrorist organization.”
Defense officials said that the airstrikes began at midnight local time with the launching of some 40 Tomahawk cruise missiles from the destroyer Arleigh Burke at positions held in Aleppo by Khorasan. The majority of the cruise missile attacks were on the Khorasan, but some were also fired at Islamic State targets around the Sunni militant headquarters in Raqqa.
The participation of the five Arab countries may bolster Mr. Obama’s argument that the campaign does not pit the United States against the Sunni Muslim world, but is, rather, a broad alliance of Sunni Muslim countries against a radical group. Some of the Arab participants, especially Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have been heavily involved in Syria’s civil war, so joining the coalition was merely a more direct form of intervention.
That first stage of the attack was conducted only by the United States. The second stage began soon after, and American warplanes were joined by fighters and bombers from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Jordan, in targeting Islamic State compounds, barracks and vehicles in northern Syria.
Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Bahrain worry that their citizens who joined the Islamic State’s forces will later return and plot attacks at home. “This is the right way to do it, if you want to defeat the Islamic State, because you cannot cut off the tail and leave the head,” said Ebtesam al-Ketbi, the chairwoman of the Emirates Policy Center. “And everyone is participating, so no one can accuse the United States alone.”
A third wave — which also included Arab countries — targeted Islamic State positions in Eastern Syria, Defense Department officials said. A senior military official said that during the three waves of strikes, the United States and its Arab allies dropped as many bombs in one night as the United States had during all of its previous operations against the Islamic State in Iraq.
But evident elsewhere in the region was a familiar current of cynicism about the motives behind the strikes. The United States and its allies “want to divide our lands, destroy our nations, occupy our homelands and monopolize our choices, without shedding one drop of their blue blood,” Massoud al-Hennawi wrote in a column in Al Ahram, a state-run newspaper in Egypt. “They have no problem that our cheap Arab blood flows in rivers, if it achieves their goals and purposes.”
During a news conference at the Pentagon, military officials showed before-and-after photographs and video of the targets hit in Syria. In one case, the military bombed what officials said was an Islamic State finance center in Raqqa, destroying electronic and communications equipment on the roof while leaving the rest of the building intact.
In another instance, American F-22 fighters targeted an Islamic State command-and-control building, hitting one side of the building, which Defense officials said the Sunni militants were using for communications, storing weapons, and meetings, while leaving the rest of the structure intact.
Lt. General William Mayville, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the strikes were the beginning of a “credible and sustainable” campaign to destroy the Islamic State. He and other Defense officials said that the hope was to limit civilian collateral damage by using precision strikes.
The intensity and scale of the strikes were greater than those launched by the United States in Iraq, where warplanes have been bombing select Islamic State targets for months. The air campaign also marks the biggest direct military intervention in Syria since the crisis began more than three years ago.
In intervening in Syria, the United States is injecting its military might into a brutal civil war between the government of President Bashar al-Assad, the Islamic State and a range of rebel groups that originally took up arms to fight Mr. Assad but have also come to oppose the Islamic State.
It was unclear what effect the American-led strikes would have on the larger conflict.
The Islamic State, while having chalked up numerous victories against the Syrian and Iraqi security forces and against Syrian rebels, has proved vulnerable to air power in Iraq, and it is unlikely that it can continue to hold all of its territory and facilities amid a sustained air campaign.
Some of Syria’s allies have suggested that the government in Damascus would benefit from strikes, although analysts question whether the Syrian military has the forces it would need to do so.
Syria also has hundreds of rebel groups, many of which hate the Islamic State, and the United States has been working with allies to build up a small number of groups deemed moderate. But these forces remain relatively small and are far from the Islamic State’s locations, so there is little chance that they will soon be able to seize control of any areas vacated by the Islamic State.
Reuters quoted an unidentified ISIS fighter as saying “these attacks will be answered.” The militants have already released videos showing the beheadings of two American hostages and of one British captive, and have threatened a fourth hostage, a Briton, with the same fate.
Additionally, an Algerian group linked to Islamic State has claimed to have kidnapped a French citizen. Prime Minister Manuel Valls told French radio that there would be “no discussion, no negotiation and we will never give in to blackmail” about the hostage’s fate.
France, whose warplanes joined the air campaign in Iraq last week but not the overnight strikes in Syria, has strongly denied persistent reports that it has paid ransom money to free its citizens held hostage by jihadist groups.
Even for a population that has grown used to the sounds and sights of war, the new strikes proved surprising.
In a video posted online, a man in Idlib Province inspected a greenish metal hunk of what he said was the remainder of the munitions used in a strike.
“No one knows what happened yet,” the man said. “This was the first time we have heard an explosion like this during this revolution.”
