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Barack Obama

US intelligence agencies have underestimated the activity of armed groups inside Syria, which has become “ground zero” for them worldwide, US President Barack Obama has said in an interview aired by American CBS television.Conversely, the US overestimated the ability of the Iraqi army to fight the groups, Obama said in the interview taped on Friday and aired on Sunday, days after the US president globally made his case for action in a speech at the UN General Assembly in New York.

Citing earlier comments by James Clapper, director of national intelligence, Obama acknowledged that US intelligence underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.

Fighters went underground when US Marines quashed al-Qaeda in Iraq with help from Iraq’s tribes, he said.

“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.”

US and its allies, including Gulf and Western countries, has been conducting air strikes on the self-declared jihadist Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group, which controls large parts of land and oil fields in Iraq and Syria.

The strikes aim at supporting the Kurdish and central Iraqi forces fighting against the ISIL on the ground.

Obama last week expanded US-led air strikes on the ISIL fighters, which began in Iraq in August, to Syria and he has been seeking to build a wider coalition effort to weaken the group. The ISIL has killed thousands of people and beheaded at least three Westerners.

Clapper told a Washington Post columnist earlier in the month that US intelligence had underestimated the ISIL and overestimated Iraq’s army.

“I did not see the collapse of the Iraqi security force in the north coming,” Clapper was quoted as saying. “I did not see that. It boils down to predicting the will to fight, which is an imponderable.”

In the interview, Obama outlined the military goal against the ISIL: “We just have to push them back, and shrink their space, and go after their command and control, and their capacity, and their weapons, and their fuelling, and cut off their financing, and work to eliminate the flow of foreign fighters.”

Meanwhile, the head of the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda has denounced US-led airstrikes in the country, warning of retaliatory attacks in the “homes” of the Western and Arab countries that have taken part in the bombings.

In an audio message posted online yesterday, Abu Mohammad al-Golani, the leader of the Nusra Front, called on European and US citizens to denounce Washington’s actions.

“Muslims will not watch while their sons are bombed. Your leaders will not be the only ones who would pay the price of the war. You will pay the heaviest price,” he said, warning that the battle would be brought “to the hearts of your homes”.

Failure to stop these strikes “will transfer the battle to your very homes,” Jolani said. The warning comes a day after the group’s spokesman, Abu Firas al-Suri, also threatened reprisals against nations participating in airstrikes, denouncing them as “a war against Islam”.

The US has been carrying out strikes against ISIL fighters in neighbouring Iraq since August 8, and on September 23 began attacking the group’s fighters in Syria.

At least 50 fighters from the Nusra Front were killed in the first wave of the US-led attacks in Syria last Tuesday, a British-based monitoring group said. — AP