US says borders do not matter in the hunt for Islamic State

World Today

One of the reasons that the Islamic State militants are able to maintain strength is that they can retreat into Syria to regroup. Now there are signs showing that the U.S. government may not limit its pursuit of the Islamic State to Iraq. CCTV America’s Jessica Stone reports.

Just a few months ago, U.S. President Barack Obama belittled the strength of the Islamic State. He called it a junior varsity basketball team compared to the more transnational threats coming from Al Qaeda.

Thursday, the top U.S. general acknowledged that the Islamic State cannot be rooted out without taking the fight to them in Syria. He was careful not to volunteer American troops for it.

However, the White House announced Friday that borders don’t matter in the hunt for the Islamic State. Any move like this now would require Congressional authorization.

The beheading of American journalist Jim Foley seems to have changed the calculus at the White House. That was a direct attack on an American and was even an attack on all Americans, said the deputy national security adviser.

For the weaponry requests by the Kurdish, the U.S. has been looking for a way to directly arm the Kurds. There are concerns about how that would impact U.S. supporting Iraqi sovereignty. There are also concerns that the weapons could get in the hands of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), a Kurdish political party that the U.S. has declared as a terror group.

Most recently, the Pentagon says that Albania has joined that international effort to deliver Iraqi weapons to the Kurds.

To dig deeper into the expansion of the Islamic State, we spoke with Daveed Gartenstein-Ross from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.