Secretary of State John Kerry says Iran shouldn’t come to a Paris conference about the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Kerry said “It would not be appropriate given the many other issues . . . with respect to their engagement in Syria and elsewhere,” according to the Washington Post.
He is in Egypt following stops in Turkey and Saudi Arabia, part of an effort to build a coalition against the Islamic State.
Kerry’s aides described Egypt as “the intellectual heart of the Arab world” with the social capital necessary to sway the Middle East. One-fourth of the Middle East population is Egyptian.
The Secretary said the ideology of the Islamic State has “nothing to do with Islam” and “it is increasingly clear that its message of hate is rejected by the overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world.”
French president Francois Hollande told Iraq’s prime minister that France would be among those hitting “terrorist locations in Iraq,” according to CNN, which added that the US has carried out 150 such air strikes against Islamic State locations in Iraq.
In a State Department briefing, aides said the Islamic State crosses borders and Egypt itself has terrorists in it, and that they did not have “a ballpark figure” for how many were in Egypt.
Ten Arab states — Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates – have joined the coalition to fight the Islamic State, reports the BBC.
