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| As the United States begins mobilizing for possible military action in Syria, rebels on Tuesday were in a war-torn area of Aleppo. Credit Zein Al-Rifai/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
President Obama, the officials said, was broadening his campaign against the Sunni militants of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and nearing a decision to authorize airstrikes and airdrops of food and water around the northern Iraqi town of Amerli, home to members of Iraq’s Turkmen minority. The town of 12,000 has been under siege for more than two months by the militants.
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| Islamic State fighters parade in the group’s stronghold of Raqqa in north-eastern Syria. Photograph: Uncredited/AP |
The US has [also] begun reconnaissance flights over Syria in preparation for a possible cross-border expansion of its aerial campaign against Islamic State militants in Iraq.
The flights, involving both manned aircraft and drones, began on Tuesday, an official confirmed to AP, after they were approved by the US president, Barack Obama, over the weekend.
Obama has been reluctant to take military action in Syria, but the flights are being seen as laying the groundwork for extending US air strikes against Islamic State militants (Isis) into the group's stronghold of Raqqa in north-eastern Syria, where it has been leading the fight against the regime of Bashar al-Assad in a civil war that has killed almost 200,000 people.
On Tuesday, Obama vowed to pursue the killers of American journalist James Foley.
"Rooting out a cancer like ISIL won't be easy and it won't be quick," he said.
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| Steven Senne/Associated Press |
Enlisting the Sunni neighbors of Syria is crucial, experts said, because airstrikes alone will not be enough to push back ISIS. The administration, Mr. Ford said, needs to pursue a sequential strategy that begins with gathering intelligence, followed by targeted airstrikes, more robust and better coordinated support for the moderate rebels, and finally, a political reconciliation process similar to that underway in Iraq.
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| Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat, recently wrote an opinion article declaring that the president needed congressional authorization for military action in Iraq. Credit Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images |
The White House is also debating how to satisfy a second constituency, Congress. Mr. Obama’s advisers are considering whether to seek congressional authorization for expanded military action and if so, under what legal rationale. Lawmakers had been reluctant to vote on airstrikes in Iraq, but several have begun arguing that the broader action being contemplated by Mr. Obama would demand a vote in Congress.
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A San Diego native fighting for ISIS in Syria was killed over the weekend, according to the Free Syrian Army. NBC News reported Tuesday that a passport and tattoo positively identified the body as that of Douglas McArthur McCain, 33. Calling himself “Duale ThaslaveofAllah” on Facebook and Twitter, he declared “It’s Islam over everything.” In 2004, McCain “reverted” to Islam, according to his Twitter. “I’m with the brothers now,” he tweeted on June 9.
McCain was once an aspiring rapper in a blue-collar Minnesota neighborhood. His high school classmates described him as a "goofball" and "always smiling." He had multiple run-ins with police and was convicted of obstruction and disorderly conduct. McCain started school at San Diego City College and worked at a Somali restuarant in the city. “He was a normal guy, who was social, open-minded, like to smile always, and always wanted to be a good Muslim," said a person who knew him from the restaurant.
McArthur actively tweeted, and his messages ranged from homophobic hate to just plane stupid. In December 2012, he tweeted "Wallahi I wants fried chicken." However, his account went silent in January 2013 until spring of this year. McCain appears to have gone to Turkey, which is a popular jihadi route to Syria. McAuthur is among hundreds of Westerns believed to have joined ISIS's war in Syria and Iraq, like Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, the British man suspected of beheading of James Foley.
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| A Hamas militant fired into the air in Gaza City on Tuesday to celebrate a cease-fire that will open border crossings for aid and reconstruction supplies. Credit Roberto Schmidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
After 50 days of fighting that took some 2,200 lives, leveled large areas of the Gaza Strip and paralyzed Israel’s south for the summer, Israeli and Palestinian leaders reached an open-ended cease-fire agreement on Tuesday that promised only limited change to conditions in Gaza and left unresolved the broader issues underpinning the conflict.
Hamas, the militant Islamist faction that dominates Gaza, declared victory even though it had abandoned most of its demands, ultimately accepting an Egyptian-brokered deal that differs little from one proffered on the battle’s seventh day. In effect, the deal put both sides back where they were at the end of eight days of fighting in 2012, with terms that called for easing but not lifting Israeli restrictions on travel, trade and fishing in Gaza.
In Israel, continual barrages of rocket fire and fears about starting school on Monday without a cease-fire had increased pressure on the government from citizens exhausted by what had become a war of attrition. Yuval Steinitz, a senior Israeli minister, said in a television interview Tuesday night that he accepted the cease-fire “with a sour taste of missed opportunity.”
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations welcomed the cease-fire but said in a statement, “The blockade of Gaza must end; Israel’s legitimate security concerns must be addressed.” He warned, “Any peace effort that does not tackle the root causes of the crisis will do little more than set the stage for the next cycle of violence.”
In Israel, support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s performance dropped by more than half this weekend from a high of more than eight in 10 Israeli Jews in the battle’s early days, according to polls conducted for Channel 2 News. Israel’s central bank cut interest rates on Monday to their lowest level ever to counter economic fallout, and Mr. Netanyahu has lashed out in recent days against senior ministers critical of the campaign, which commentators and politicians have increasingly argued was ill conceived.
Israel achieved its original stated goal, to restore quiet, but Hamas’s repeated penetration of Israeli territory through tunnels, the deaths of the most Israeli soldiers since the 2006 Lebanon war, and the killing on Friday of 4-year-old Daniel Tregerman in a kibbutz near Gaza have scarred the country’s psyche.
Israeli analysts said that since 1973, no prime minister has emerged from a war unscathed. Yehuda Ben Meir, an expert on public opinion at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, cautioned that it was too early to assess the outcome of the campaign.