Coalition Debates Expanding ISIS Fight

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/30/world/middleeast/coalition-debates-expanding-isis-fight.html

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WASHINGTON — The Islamic State’s efforts to expand its reach beyond Iraq and Syria have spurred a debate within the coalition that the United States has assembled to confront the group about whether it needs to broaden its campaign.

The Islamic State has sent a small number of fighters to Libya to help organize militants there, a new indication that the group is seeking to enlarge its self-declared caliphate, American officials said on Wednesday.

The question of how the coalition should respond is emerging as a sensitive issue for the Obama administration, which is struggling to win congressional support for a measure authorizing the use of military force against the group.

Maintaining the unity of the more than 60-nation coalition against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, may require the United States to agree to a broadening of the campaign to include terrorist groups that have declared themselves to be “provinces” of the Islamic State.

Egypt, for example, is worried about the Islamic State’s support for Ansar al-Sharia, the Libyan terrorist group, and the financial support that the group has been providing to Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, a terrorist group in the Sinai Peninsula. Italy, which is facing a flood of desperate refugees from North Africa, has also been greatly concerned about terrorist groups in Libya.

Foreign ministers from leading members of the coalition are expected to meet within the next two months, and the spread of the Islamic State is expected to be one of the major issues on their agenda.

The Obama administration has emphasized that the efforts against the Islamic State are not purely military, but also involve cutting into its financing and slowing the flow of foreign fighters to the group. Even so, some American lawmakers have expressed worries that the fight may morph into a version of the Bush administration’s “global war on terrorism,” which could compound the challenge of winning congressional support.

Intelligence officials estimate that the Islamic State’s fighters number 20,000 to 31,500 in Syria and Iraq. There are less formal pledges of support from “at least a couple hundred extremists” in countries such as Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Yemen, according to American counterterrorism officials.

But not every terrorist group that claims to be fighting under the banner of the Islamic State is necessarily working with the group, and it is not clear to what extent the Islamic State exerts command over the groups it is supporting. The Islamic State began attracting pledges of allegiance from groups and individual fighters after it declared the formation of a caliphate, or religious state, in June 2014. Counterterrorism analysts say it is using Al Qaeda’s franchise structure to expand its geographic reach, but without Al Qaeda’s rigorous multiyear application process. This could allow its franchises to grow faster, easier and farther.

It is not clear how the United States will deal with the Islamic State’s increasingly global ambitions when the foreign ministers meet. The United States could declare some foreign terrorist groups to be full-fledged affiliates of the Islamic State, or opt for expressing a generalized concern about its increasing reach and the need to confront it.

Providing new details, American officials said that the Islamic State had sent a senior Iraqi militant, among a dozen or so other fighters, to Libya to provide “technical” support to Ansar al-Sharia, which has about 5,000 fighters.

In Egypt, the Sinai-based extremist group Ansar Beit al-Maqdis sent emissaries to the Islamic State in Syria last year to seek financial support, weapons and tactical advice, as well as the publicity and recruiting advantages that might come from declaring itself to be the Sinai province of the Islamic State caliphate, according to Western officials briefed on classified intelligence reports.

The group has received some financial backing from the Islamic State, though not as much as it would have liked, American officials said.

The Islamic State has provided technical assistance to the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram to help it create its video propaganda. While Boko Haram has declared itself to be a province of the Islamic State’s caliphate, experts do not believe it is an integral part of the organization.

In Afghanistan in February, an American drone strike killed a former Taliban commander, Mullah Abdul Rauf Khadim, who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and had recently begun recruiting fighters. But that pledge seemed to indicate less a major expansion of the Islamic State than a deepening of internal divisions in the Taliban.

This month, Malaysian authorities announced that they had arrested a group of militants who were suspected of planning an Islamic State attack. But American officials say they may have been members of the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah who have rebranded themselves.

Abu Sayyaf, the Philippine terrorist group, would like to be a formal part of the Islamic State but has not been accepted.