Obama: US misjudged ISIL threat, Iraqi army

President Barack Obama acknowledged during a "60 Minutes" interview on CBS on Sunday that U.S. intelligence agencies underestimated the threat from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and overestimated the ability and will of Iraq's army to fight. Also on Sunday, Republican House Speaker John Boehner said the U.S. may have "no choice" but to send American troops to fight ISIL if Obama's strategy fails to destroy the group. 

Obama added that the U.S.-led military campaign against ISIL and the Nusra Front, an Al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, is helping Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whom the United Nations has accused of war crimes.

"I recognize the contradiction in a contradictory land and a contradictory circumstance," Obama said. "We are not going to stabilize Syria under the rule of Assad," whose government has committed "terrible atrocities," Obama said.

"On the other hand, in terms of immediate threats to the United States, ISIL, the Khorasan group — those folks could kill Americans." 

Obama said his first priority is degrading the extremists who are threatening Iraq and the West. To defeat them, he acknowledged, will require a competent local ground force, something no analysts predict will surface anytime soon in Syria, despite U.S. plans to arm and train moderate rebels. The U.S. has said it will not cooperate with the Assad government.

"Right now, we've got a campaign plan that has a strong chance for success in Iraq," the president said. "Syria is a more challenging situation."

Obama described the U.S. intelligence assessments in response to a question asked during the interview. He was asked about how ISIL fighters had come to control so much territory in Syria and Iraq and whether it was a surprise to him.

He said that during the Iraq War, U.S. military forces, with the help of Iraq's Sunni tribes were able to quash Al-Qaeda fighters, who went "back underground."

"During the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swaths of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos," Obama said, according to an excerpt released before the show aired.

He noted that his director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has acknowledged that the U.S. "underestimated what had been taking place in Syria." Obama said it was "absolutely true" that the U.S. overestimated the ability and will of the Iraqi army.

Obama called Syria ground zero for jihadis around the world and said military force was necessary to shrink their capacity, cut off financing and eliminate the flow of foreign fighters.

The White House has cited its intelligence weaknesses before, although Obama was less adamant about the threat in the past. In an interview published early this year by The New Yorker, he appeared to minimize ISIL by comparing it to a junior varsity basketball team. The White House at the time said he was speaking about a different threat posed by a range of extremists across the world.

Obama pushed back against the remarks by Boehner, who told ABC's "This Week" during a Sunday appearance that he doesn't believe Obama's approach will succeed and that it will take more than airstrikes to destroy ISIL. He criticized Obama for saying he won't send in American ground troops.

Boehner said he would recommend sending in Americans if no one else was able to step up. "We have no choice," he said, because "if we don't destroy them first, we're gonna pay the price."

Obama, however, made clear he has no interest in a major U.S. ground presence beyond the 1,600 American advisers and special operations troops he already has ordered to Iraq.

"We are assisting Iraq in a very real battle that's taking place on their soil, with their troops," the president said. "This is not America against ISIL. This is America leading the international community to assist a country with whom we have a security partnership."

While an "overwhelming majority of Muslims are peaceful," Obama said, "in the Muslim world right now, there is a cancer that has grown for too long that suggests that it is acceptable to kill innocent people who worship a different God. And that kind of extremism, unfortunately, means that we're  going to see for some time the possibility that in a whole bunch of different countries, radical groups may spring up, particularly in countries that are still relatively fragile, where you had sectarian tensions, where you don't have a strong state security apparatus."

But "rather than play whack-a-mole and send U.S. troops wherever this occurs, we have to build strong partnerships," Obama said. "We have to get the international community to recognize this is a problem. We've got to get Arab and Muslim leaders to say very clearly, 'These folks do not represent us. They do not represent Islam."'

Meanwhile, airstrikes believed to have been carried out by U.S.-led forces hit three makeshift oil refineries in Syria's Raqqa province early on Sunday as part of an assault to weaken ISIL, a monitoring group said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is based in Britain, said the attacks occurred shortly after midnight, adding that they also hit a plastics factory.

ISIL fighters have control over oil produced in eastern Syria and have set up small makeshift refineries to distill the crude into fuel, one of their main sources of income.

"These so-called refineries are not a real target, and they do not weaken Islamic State, as they do not have any financial value for them," Rami Abdelrahman of the Observatory told Reuters. "They are composed of trucks with equipment to separate diesel and petrol used by civilians."

He said that destroying the makeshift refineries has led to a sharp increase in the price of diesel, adding that for residents in Syria's northern Aleppo province, for example, the price has more than doubled. "The price went up from 9,000 Syrian pounds to 21,000 in Aleppo. Hitting these refineries has affected ordinary people," he said.

The effect of the strikes on the group's capabilities was not immediately clear. ISIL has gained support among other fighters after the attacks, including from rival groups.

Scores of fighters have left the Nusra Front and other armed groups in Syria to join ISIL since the strikes started.

The Nusra Front is coming under increasing pressure from its members to reconcile with ISIL.

On Saturday the group gave its first reaction to the strikes, vowing to retaliate against Western and Arab countries that took part in the coalition.

"These countries have done a despicable act that will put them on the list of those targeted by jihadist forces all over the world," Nusra spokesman Abu Firas al-Suri said in an audio message published on the group's social media network.

Near the Turkish border in Syria, the U.S.-led airstrikes have failed to stop the advance of ISIL fighters on Syria's Kurdish town of Kobane, triggering an exodus of more than 150,000 refugees into Turkish territory.

A senior official in Syria's dominant Kurdish political party welcomed the U.S.-led coalition that bombed ISIL positions around the town Saturday and said that Kurds were ready to work with the alliance to fight ISIL. Asya Abdullah of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) said that Turkey should provide them with weapons.

"Turkey should arm the PYD ... Kobane is right at the border. If these gangs enter Kobane, nothing will stop them from going to Turkey next," she told Reuters via phone from Kobane.

On Sunday 300 to 400 Syrian Kurds crossed back into Syria from Turkey to help fight ISIL, a soldier on the border told Reuters, adding that Turkish authorities were not allowing any Turkish Kurds to go to Kobane.

Several hundred Kurds were waiting at Mursitpinar, on the Turkish side of the border, in the hope of being allowed to fight in Syria, a Reuters witness said.

"Of course we want to go and fight," said Mustafa Durdu, a Turkish Kurd who has not been permitted to leave Turkey by Turkish authorities. "Our brothers are there," he said, pointing to Kobane.

Wire services