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WASHINGTON — With extremist attacks proliferating around the world, the United States has reassembled its coalition partners for meetings Wednesday and Thursday to review a two-year-old campaign to eliminate Daesh (the so-called IS).
Deputy Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman, second deputy premier and minister of defense, is leading the Saudi delegation.
The meeting will discuss progress to date, the essential next steps in the campaign and how the nations of the coalition can accelerate the drive to deal Daesh a lasting defeat, the Pentagon said.
Since late 2014, Saudi Arabia has been part of a US-led coalition which officially has 65 members and has been bombing the Daesh group which seized large parts of Syria and Iraq.
The militant group may have lost ground in Iraq and Syria, but in recent weeks it has claimed horrific attacks in Nice, Istanbul, Baghdad and Dhaka that have left hundreds dead and injured.
The attacks are “going to be a primary focus, obviously, of the discussions,” Brett McGurk, US President Barack Obama’s special envoy to the anti-Daesh coalition, acknowledged.
For two days, US Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter will meet about 40 of their counterparts in Washington, including France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault and Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.
Echoing French Prime Minister Manuel Valls’ warning of more attacks ahead and more “innocents killed,” McGurk also cautioned: “Nobody can say these attacks are going to stop. Unfortunately, I think we are going to see more of these.”
McGurk emphasized that the coalition, which has conducted 14,000 air strikes in two years, is “succeeding on the ground.” But he added, “We have a lot of work to do on (extremist) networks.”
The problem, says Michael Weiss, an expert at the Atlantic Council think tank, is that “at the territorial level ... Daesh is down but not out.”
“It has lost its ability to back and hold large swaths of terrain but it has not lost its ability to wage ... opportunistic attacks,” he said.
Washington maintains that since its peak in 2014 Daesh has lost nearly 50 percent of the Iraqi territory it conquered and between 20 and 30 percent of its Syrian strongholds.
Peter Cook, the Pentagon press secretary, also insisted: “There is a sincere interest — and you’ll see it reflected at this meeting — that that effort will accelerate.”
The coalition will also be discussing the subject of a separate donors meeting. The United States, Japan, Canada, Germany, Netherlands and Kuwait are hoping to raise two billion dollars in pledges, according to US diplomats.
