Obama speaks at the Leaders’ Summit on Countering ISIL and Violent Extremism at the UN General Assembly in New York yesterday.

AFP/United Nations

US President Barack Obama said yesterday that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must go if the Islamic State group is to be defeated, as he rallied world leaders to reinvigorate the coalition campaign against the militants.
A day after clashing with Russian President Vladimir Putin over how to handle the crisis in Syria, Obama hosted a counter-terrorism summit at the United Nations to take stock of the one-year air war against IS fighters in Iraq and Syria.
“In Syria (...) defeating ISIL requires, I believe, a new leader,” Obama told the gathering of some 100 leaders, held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
Russia snubbed the meeting, sending a low-level diplomat after Putin stole the limelight with his UN speech calling for a broad coalition to fight IS that would include Syria’s army.
Assad’s fate is the key bone of contention between Washington and the Syrian leader’s Russian and Iranian allies amid intense diplomacy over the way forward to end the four-year war that has killed more than 240,000 people.
At the summit, Obama said the United States was ready to work with Russia and Iran to “find a political mechanism in which it is possible to begin a transition process”.
The United States has long insisted that Assad must leave power, but Obama did not specify in his remarks whether the Syrian leader could take part in a transition in an interim role.
Russia’s UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin blasted the US-led summit as “disrespectful” toward the United Nations, saying it “seriously undermines UN efforts in this direction”.
Today, Russia is to host a special UN Security Council meeting on the same issue—an event bound to highlight sharp differences in approach.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius accused Russia of displaying bravado on the Syria crisis that had yet to be backed up with action against the IS group.
“You have to look at who is doing what. The international community is striking Daesh. France is striking Daesh. The Russians, for the time being, are not at all,” Fabius told a news conference, using the Arabic acronym for IS.
“If one is against the terrorists, it is not abnormal to strike the terrorists,” Fabius added.
The counter-terrorism summit takes place a year after Obama stole the limelight at the last UN gathering when he vowed to crush IS and called on countries to join the United States in the campaign.
Taking stock one year on, Obama said IS had lost a third of the “populated areas” it controlled in Iraq and had been “cut off” from almost all of Turkey’s border region.
But he added that military action alone would not succeed and that the coalition must address the conditions that allow radicalism to thrive.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi called for international aid to equip his troops fighting the militants, who triggered alarm after seizing the city of Mosul in June last year.
Since then, IS fighters have captured territory in Syria and Iraq and gained a foothold in Libya, Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, with alliances as far afield as Nigeria, with Boko Haram.
Iran was not invited to the summit even though it is playing a major role in the fight against IS, providing military advisers, weapons and trainers.
The 104 leaders discussed combating foreign fighters and countering violent extremism as reports show the flow of militants to Iraq and Syria has continued unabated.
US intelligence fears nearly 30,000 foreign fighters have travelled to Iraq and Syria since 2011, many of them to join IS, a task force said in a key report released in Congress yesterday.
The US-led coalition that now comprises some 60 countries including Syria’s neighbours has carried out more than 5,000 air raids, pounding IS targets in Iraq and Syria, with France this week joining the campaign in Syria.
Aside from the aerial bombardment of IS targets, the Pentagon has set up a $500mn programme to train “moderate” Syrian rebels.
But that tactic has turned into a fiasco after the Pentagon said only a few dozen fighters had been trained and that some of those had handed over their weapons to Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria.

US sanctions Islamic State supporters, targets finances
The United States tightened financial pressure on Islamic State yesterday, slapping sanctions on more than 30 leaders, supporters and affiliates around the world to squeeze the militant group Washington is having trouble defeating.
The Treasury Department designated 15 people as IS supporters for providing technical, logistic or financial backing, working as political leaders or recruiting foreign fighters. The designations allow the government to freeze their assets and bars US citizens from dealing with them.
The State Department named 10 individuals and five groups affiliated with IS as foreign terrorist fighters, a designation that enables financial sanctions and penalties on them and their supporters.
The people and groups designated by the United States came from the United Kingdom, France and Russia to Pakistan, Afghanistan and Indonesia, “highlighting the truly global nature of the threat that these actors pose”, a senior US official told reporters.
The aim is to prevent IS from using its funds to buy weapons and spare parts, and block it from supporting new affiliates that have been emerging around the world, another senior administration official said.
The official called the sanctions “a real ramp-up in our efforts” to prevent IS militants from using the international financial system to spread its cash and influence by supporting affiliated groups.
The State Department designations included Islamic State’s Khorasan and Caucuses affiliates, as well as the Mujahidin Indonesian Timur, an IS-linked group operating in Indonesia, and the Jund al-Khilafah, a similar organisation in Algeria.
The State Department also designated the Iraq-based Jaysh Rijal al-Tariq al Naqshabandi as a terrorist group. It launched operations against coalition forces in Iraq in 2006 following the hanging of deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussain and has continued since then.