Faced with a barrage of criticism that the Iraqi forces are crumbling in the face of Islamic State advances, President Obama said Monday that he’s asked the Pentagon to ramp up recruitment efforts for the Iraqi military, including by recruiting soldiers from Sunni tribes, and to speed up the rate at which new Iraqi troops are trained.
“We want to get more Iraqi security forces trained, fresh, well-equipped and focused…so we’re reviewing a range of plans for how we might do that,” the president said at a press conference at the end of the G-7 summit in Germany. “When a finalized plan is presented to me by the Pentagon, then I will share it with the American people.”
“We don’t yet have a complete strategy, because it requires commitments on the part of the Iraqis as well, about how recruitment takes place, how that training takes place,” Obama added. “And so, the details of that are not yet worked out.”
Obama said stopping the flow of foreign fighters getting to Iraq from Syria through the Turkish border is another serious problem. But he said the real problem is disappointing recruitment efforts to replenish Iraqi troops and build a bigger army to take on the Islamic State, which is constantly reinforcing its losses with fighters streaming in from strongholds in Syria.
“What is fair to say, all the countries in the international coalition are prepared to do more to train Iraqi security forces if they feel that that additional work is taken advantage of,” he said. “One of the things we’re seeing is we’ve got more training capacity than we’ve got recruits.”
Obama encouraged Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and the Iraqi legislature to create a National Guard, which he said could help to persuade more Sunni tribes to get more involved more rapidly.
Al-Abadi, however, faces an uphill battle to reach out to Sunni tribes after a number of Sunni tribal sheiks in the country’s Anbar province pledged allegiance to the Islamic State late last week.
In an attempt to stem the tide of foreign fighters across the Turkish border, Obama said the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State is trying to monitor that border more effectively, but needs greater cooperation from Ankara to do so.
“Turkey forces recognize it’s a problem but haven’t ramped up the security forces we need there,” he said. “…If we can cut off the flow, we can wear out the ISIL forces that are already there [in Iraq].”
U.S. and Turkish officials have been discussing new efforts to try to clear Islamic State fighters from the border, but some of those more concrete discussions regarding a potential no-fly zone on the Turkish border were put off until after the state-wide elections, which took place over the weekend.
