Obama rejects sending troops to tackle ISIS

Calls move ‘serious mistake’

People gather Monday in front of Le Carillon cafe, one of the sites of the recent attacks in Paris. French President Francois Hollande says the Paris attacks targeted “youth in all its diversity” and that the victims were of 19 different nationalities.
People gather Monday in front of Le Carillon cafe, one of the sites of the recent attacks in Paris. French President Francois Hollande says the Paris attacks targeted “youth in all its diversity” and that the victims were of 19 different nationalities.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama ruled out dispatching U.S. troops against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, saying it would be a "serious mistake" that would lead the nation into an unsustainable strategy requiring a long-term occupation in the region.

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AP

A woman prays Monday as she pays tribute in Nice, France, to the victims of the terror attacks. France is urging its European partners to move swiftly to boost intelligence sharing, fight arms trafficking and terror financing, and strengthen border security in the wake of the Paris attacks.

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AP

Roses and French flags rest on the names of victims engraved into the rim of the 9/11 Memorial South Pool after a somber moment Monday for victims of this weekend’s Paris terrorist attacks and a show of unity in New York.

Obama's comments come as French President Francois Hollande said he wants to bring the United States and Russia together in a grand coalition dedicated to smashing the Islamic State.

Hollande told lawmakers in a rare joint session in the Palace of Versailles on Monday about his push for a new coalition.

He said the United States and Russia needed to set aside their policy divisions over Syria, adding that he hoped to meet soon with Obama and Russian leader Vladimir Putin "to unify our strength and achieve a result that has been too long in coming."

"We need a union of all who can fight this terrorist army in a single coalition," he said, without offering details of how such a coalition would work.

Obama called the Islamic State terror organization "the face of evil" and insisted the United States and its allies are shrinking its hold in Syria and Iraq even as the extremist group has demonstrated its ability to commit violence beyond the region.

The deadly attacks in Paris last week were "a terrible and sickening setback" in what will be a long campaign against the Islamic State, Obama said Monday, shortly after meeting with leaders of European countries at a summit in Turkey.

The U.S. will continue a strategy that concentrates on military power -- in the form of airstrikes and working with local forces -- economic pressure and attempts to stabilize failed states where the group has thrived, Obama said. He also said the U.S. would streamline intelligence-sharing with France to give French authorities more timely information.

What won't work, he said, is sending thousands more U.S. troops into the fight.

"We would see a repetition of what we've seen before, which is if you do not have local populations that are committed" to helping combat extremism, Obama said, the terrorists "resurface, unless we are prepared to have a permanent occupation of these countries."

The terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday, which left at least 129 dead and more than 300 wounded, dominated the meeting of leaders from the world's 20 biggest economies in Antalya, Turkey. The G-20 leaders, including Putin, pledged to redouble efforts to cut off financing for terror groups and disrupt recruitment efforts.

The U.S. and Russia are working with other powers in the region on a plan to stabilize Syria that is intended to bring about a political resolution of that country's 4-year-old civil war. The Islamic State has taken advantage of the conflict there to seize territory and recruit worldwide.

The U.S. has already begun working with France and other countries since Saturday to step up airstrikes against the group in Iraq and Syria. Obama met Monday with British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi of Italy and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on the next steps in the fight.

Obama lit into his domestic critics, particularly some Republicans running in the 2016 presidential campaign who've called for a more robust military campaign against the Islamic State.

"Some of them seem to think that if I were just more bellicose in expressing what we're doing, that that would make a difference, because that seems to be the only thing that they're doing, is talking as if they're tough," Obama said.

Republican critics have offered few concrete alternatives, he said, with the exceptions of sending in ground forces or establishing no-fly zones, moves that open up a "whole set of questions that have to be answered."

Republicans and also some Democrats have challenged Obama's approach to the Islamic State, saying he lacks a clear strategy. The president's approach centers largely on airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, as well as programs to train and equip moderate opposition forces. He's also sent more than 3,000 troops to Iraq to assist that country's security forces and recently announced plans to send up to 50 Americans into Syria.

Obama said he envisioned escalating that strategy, not overhauling it. And he called on other nations to step up their involvement in the fight against the extremists.

The Islamic State's increasing focus on targets outside the military has raised questions about whether Obama underestimated the group. He once referred to the extremists as a "JV team" and said shortly before the Paris attack that their capacity in Iraq and Syria had been contained.

The president conceded there were challenges in defeating the Islamic State given that its fighters have a "willingness to die."

"If you have a handful of people who don't mind dying, they can kill a lot of people," he said.

While officials say the U.S. had been aware of the Islamic State's desire to strike targets outside the Middle East, Obama said he had not been briefed on any intelligence that indicated an attack in Paris was likely.

"I'm not aware of anything that was specific," he said.

The president grew visibly irritated with repeated questions during his news conference about whether he should act more decisively or faster to destroy Islamic State. He said he is aware his approach doesn't offer the satisfaction of a "neat headline" or an immediate solution.

"What I'm not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of 'American leadership' or 'America winning"' that has "no relationship to what is actually going to work," he said.

Crackdown in France

In France, Hollande signaled a likely months long security crackdown as authorities worldwide struggled to pinpoint those responsible for the deadliest attacks on French soil since World War II.

Hollande said he would present a bill Wednesday seeking to extend a state of emergency -- granting the police and military greater powers of search and arrest and local governments the right to ban demonstrations and impose curfews -- for another three months.

He pledged to hire 5,000 more police within the next two years, to freeze cuts in military personnel through 2019, and to introduce other bills that would stiffen jail terms for arms trafficking and make it easier to deport suspected terrorists.

He also proposed more lasting steps, including changes to the constitution that would allow authorities to withdraw French citizenship from people with dual nationality, even if they were born in France, and to prevent French terror suspects from returning to France. Any constitutional changes would need to be approved by the National Assembly.

Hollande spoke as European authorities expanded the manhunt for suspects involved in Friday night's attacks.

By late Monday, French and Belgian officials had conducted more than 160 raids, arrested more than 20 suspects and seized weapons as they sought to identify others involved in planning the attacks and to pinpoint links between attackers and the Islamic State's leaders in Syria and Iraq.

Authorities were zeroing in on the role of a man they said they believe to be a key figure in the Islamic State's operations in Europe, and to have been involved in the Paris plot -- possibly playing a coordinating role from the militants' bases in Syria.

Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a 27-year-old Belgian national of Moroccan descent, has already been linked to a number of terror attempts in Europe this year, including an attempted assault aboard a high-speed, Paris-bound train in August that was stopped by American passengers.

A French official familiar with the case described Abaaoud as the "guru" of several assailants, including Salah Abdeslam, the 26-year-old tied to Friday's bloodshed who is now the subject of an international dragnet. In August, a French foreign fighter who returned to France told authorities that Abaaoud had mentioned "a concert hall" among other possible terror targets to strike in France.

One French official familiar with the investigation, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive investigation, said the French government was working to establish the extent of Abaaoud's role. The official described Abaaoud as a "barbaric man."

Police, however, struggled to achieve a breakthrough in their hunt for militants who survived Friday's assaults. Six blew themselves up with suicide belts while police shot to death a seventh. Iraqi officials said their intelligence agency suggested that 19 attackers and five backup activists committed the carnage, an assertion not publicly supported by Western intelligence agencies.

France has issued an arrest warrant for Abdeslam, who they said was the driver of a car that delivered attackers to the scene of greatest slaughter, a rock concert inside a theater in which 89 died.

Belgian police on Monday donned balaclavas and assault rifles as they mounted a tense hours long standoff outside Abdeslam's suspected hideout in the Brussels district of Molenbeek but made no arrests after storming the residence.

One of Abdeslam's brothers, Brahim, blew himself up outside a Paris restaurant, killing one civilian, during Friday night's attacks. Another brother, Mohamed, was detained by Belgian police but released without charge Monday.

Authorities also identified two more of the attackers, one of them a 28-year-old Frenchman already charged in a terrorism investigation in 2012.

Samy Amimour, who blew himself up at the Bataclan music hall Friday night, had been placed under judicial supervision. An international arrest warrant was issued in the fall of 2013 after he failed to comply with bail conditions. Three of his relatives were placed under police custody Monday morning.

The other new name released Monday was that of Ahmad al-Mohammed, who blew himself up outside the national soccer stadium. He was found with a Syrian passport that gave his name as Ahmad Al Mohammad, a 25-year-old born in Idlib. The prosecutor's office said fingerprints from the attacker match those of someone who passed through Greece in early October.

U.S. destroys oil trucks

As France responded to the attacks by stepping up airstrikes on suspected Islamic State power bases in Syria, U.S. warplanes for the first time attacked hundreds of trucks on Monday that the extremist group has been using to smuggle the crude oil it has been producing in Syria, U.S. officials said.

According to an initial assessment, 116 trucks were destroyed in the attack, which took place near Deir al-Zour, an area in eastern Syria that is controlled by the Islamic State.

The airstrikes were carried out by four A-10 attack planes and two AC-130 gunships based in Turkey.

Plans for the strike were developed well before the terrorist attacks in and around Paris on Friday, officials familiar with the operation said, part of a broader operation to disrupt the ability of the Islamic State to generate revenue to support its military operations and govern its territory.

To disrupt that source of revenue, U.S. officials said last week that the United States had sharply stepped up its airstrikes against infrastructure that allows the Islamic State to pump oil in Syria.

Until Monday, the United States had refrained from striking the fleet used to transport oil, believed to include more than 1,000 tanker trucks, because of concerns about causing civilian casualties. As a result, the Islamic State's distribution system for exporting oil had remained largely intact.

To reduce the risk of harming civilians, two F-15 warplanes dropped leaflets about an hour before the attack warning drivers to abandon their vehicles, and strafing runs were conducted to reinforce the message.

On Monday, 295 trucks were in the area of the strikes, and more than a third of them were destroyed, U.S. officials said. The A-10s dropped two dozen 500-pound bombs and conducted strafing runs with 30-millimeter Gatling guns. The AC-130s attacked with 30-millimeter Gatling guns and 105-millimeter cannons.

The pilots saw several drivers running to a nearby tent and did not attack them, a U.S. official said, and there were no immediate reports of civilian casualties.

Information for this article was contributed by Toluse Olorunnipa, Helene Fouquet, Matthew Campbell, Robert Hutton, Angela Greiling Keane, Mike Dorning, Margaret Talev and Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg News; by Lori Hinnant, Sylvie Corbet, Greg Keller, Philippe Sotto, Jamey Keaten, Raphael Satter, Angela Charlton, Jill Lawless, Thomas Adamson, John Leicester, Raf Casert, John-Thor Dahlburg, Suzan Fraser, Desmond Butler, David Rising, Maamoun Youssef, Danica Kirka, Shawn Pogatchnik, Julie Pace of The Associated Press; by Anthony Faiola,Steven Mufson,Souad Mekhennet, Missy Ryan,Cleophee Demoustier, Virgile Demoustier, Karla Adam, Monique El-Faizy, Liz Sly, Hugh Naylor, Brian Murphy, Greg Miller, William Branigin and Elinda Labropoulou of The Washington Post; and by Michael R. Gordon of The New York Times.

A Section on 11/17/2015

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