Obama urges world to fight Islamic State

UNITED NATIONS -- President Barack Obama laid out a blueprint Wednesday for deeper U.S. engagement in the Middle East, telling the United Nations General Assembly that the Islamic State understood only "the language of force," and the United States would "work with a broad coalition to dismantle this network of death."

In an address two days after he expanded the U.S.-led military campaign against the extremist group into Syria, Obama said, "Today, I ask the world to join in this effort," declaring, "We will not succumb to threats, and we will demonstrate that the future belongs to those who build, not those who destroy.

"Those who have joined ISIL should leave the battlefield while they can," Obama said, referring to the group by an acronym for its former name, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

"We will neither tolerate terrorist safe-havens, nor act as an occupying power," Obama said. "We will take action against threats to our security, and our allies, while building an architecture of counterterrorism cooperation."

"The brutality of terrorists in Syria and Iraq forces us to look into the heart of darkness," Obama said.

The military campaign against the Islamic State, Obama said, was the most urgent of a raft of global challenges in which the United States had no choice but to play a leadership role: resisting Russia's aggression against Ukraine, coordinating a response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, brokering a new unity government in Afghanistan and marshaling a new push to confront climate change.

Obama criticized Russia's incursions into Ukraine and promised to impose a rising cost on the government of President Vladimir Putin for what he called its aggression. He was particularly critical in describing the downing of a Malaysian commercial airliner over eastern Ukraine, which killed 298 people, and subsequent efforts to block recovery and investigative teams.

"This is a vision of the world in which might makes right," he said, "a world in which one nation's borders can be redrawn by another and civilized people are not allowed to recover the remains of their loved ones because of the truth that might be revealed."

Obama also said the United States would train and equip moderate opposition forces in Syria to counter the government of President Bashar Assad, and he repeated calls for a political settlement to end a civil war in the country that has killed more than 200,000 people.

"Cynics may argue that such an outcome can never come to pass. But there is no other way for this madness to end -- whether one year from now or 10," he said. "I can promise you America will remain engaged in the region, and we are prepared to engage in that effort."

Still, on the Syrian civil war and Iran -- issues that Obama identified last year as two of his top priorities -- he struck a markedly different tone.

Obama did not single out the Syrian president for criticism, as he did last year, over the use of chemical weapons, though he spoke of the brutality of the civil war. Assad has voiced support for the U.S.-led strikes in Syria, and his air force has not interfered with U.S. warplanes entering Syrian airspace.

Obama mentioned Iran only in a cursory fashion, asking its leaders not to let the opportunity for a nuclear agreement slip by. U.S. officials have privately expressed skepticism about the likelihood of reaching a deal with Tehran.

Iranian President Hasan Rouhani, who is to address the assembly today, responded by saying the United States should move beyond "insignificant" fears that his country seeks nuclear arms. Instead, he said, the two countries must focus on the fight against extremist groups, the "real and serious common challenges which ... threaten the entirety of the world."

At the same time, he was critical of the U.S. bombing campaign and the growing coalition of countries seeking to stop the extremists by military means.

"Bombing and airstrikes are not the appropriate way," he said, warning that "extraterritorial interference ... in fact only feeds and strengthens terrorism."

Blaming "the misunderstandings of the realities of the region by ... outsiders," Rouhani said wrong U.S. policies, including the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, likely led to the birth of the Islamic State group by creating power vacuums exploited by the extremists.

Obama made clear that the United States would act against the Islamic State only if surrounded by a broad international coalition. He dwelled on his success in signing up five Arab nations to take part in the airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria, casting it as a historic moment in which the Sunni Arab world was united to fight the scourge of Sunni extremism.

British Prime Minister David Cameron said late Wednesday in his own address that he will ask Parliament to approve joining international airstrikes against the Islamic State group in Iraq. He did not mention the prospect of joining the strikes in Syria.

Cameron also warned against believing that it's necessary to "do a deal" with Syria's Assad to defeat the Islamic State, calling that thinking "dangerously misguided." He said the brutality of Assad's government has been a powerful recruiting tool for extremists during the conflict there, which is now in its fourth year.

In an echo of his speech to the Islamic world in 2009, Obama addressed young Muslims directly Wednesday, appealing to them to resist the draw of violent jihad.

"You come from a great tradition that stands for education, not ignorance; innovation, not destruction; the dignity of life, not murder," Obama said. "Those who call you away from this path are betraying this tradition, not defending it."

Foreign fighters

Obama's speech was the centerpiece of a hectic three days of diplomacy for the president, who met Tuesday with the five Arab leaders to thank them for supporting the Syria operation.

Later Wednesday, he led a Security Council meeting where members unanimously adopted a resolution requiring all countries to prevent the recruitment and transport of would-be foreign fighters preparing to join terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State.

At the Security Council meeting, the president of Turkey accused the international community of doing too little to stem the flow of foreign fighters to Syria and slammed the U.N. Security Council's inaction on some of the world's most pressing issues.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey was playing a leading role in fighting terrorism but was not being aided by the rest of the world.

"We can stop this flow of foreign terrorist fighters only if our friends and partners awaiting our cooperation show, themselves, a sort of cooperation as well," Erdogan said.

But Turkey, a key backer of the rebels seeking to oust Assad, is under scrutiny for allowing thousands of fighters to cross into Syria across its borders.

Syrian U.N. Ambassador Bashar Jaafari said Wednesday that Turkey was the "main gate for terrorists crossing into Syria and Iraq." He said Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have turned their airports into "reception halls" for extremists before sending them illegally to Syria.

U.S. intelligence officials estimate that some 12,000 foreigners have traveled to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State, which has many as 31,000 fighters.

Erdogan said the threat of foreign terrorist fighters starts "the moment these individuals depart from the source countries" and that countries concerned have not cooperated in a timely fashion.

Refugee crisis

Also speaking Wednesday at the General Assembly meeting was U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who called for world leaders to join an international campaign to ease the plight of nearly unprecedented numbers of refugees, the displaced and victims of violence in a world wracked by wars and the swift-spreading and deadly Ebola epidemic.

Ban said leaders must find and nurture "seeds of hope" in the turmoil and despair of a world that may seem like it's falling apart with people crying out for protection from greed and inequality.

"Not since the end of the Second World War have there been so many refugees, displaced people and asylum seekers. Never before has the United Nations been asked to reach so many people with emergency food assistance and other lifesaving supplies," Ban said in his state of the world address at the opening of the meeting.

Several leaders including Erdogan and Jordan's King Abdullah addressed the challenges -- financial and social -- of hosting hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria.

Abdullah, whose country is sheltering nearly 1.4 million Syrians, said the refugee crisis "demands a global solution."

"To date, the response has not kept pace with the real needs," he said.

After Ban's speech, speaker after speaker addressed a host of other topics including illegal immigration; promoting equality for women; and overhauling the powerful U.N. Security Council to reflect the 21st century, not the post-World War II world.

On a positive note, Mauritania's President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, who currently heads the 54-nation African Union, touted the continent's economic growth, now close to 6 percent on average, and its promotion of agriculture, which now employs close to 60 percent of the workforce and represents one-third of the continent's gross domestic product.

"Africa is working relentlessly to change from a consumption space to a production zone in order to guarantee employment opportunities for millions of its people," he said.

Abdel Aziz called for "strong action to find efficient and rapid solutions" to the phenomenon of illegal immigration and address the unemployment that leads African youths to seek opportunities elsewhere.

"We cannot just count the bodies washed up onto the beaches or undertake rescue operations at sea for thousands of migrants crammed in unsafe boats," he said.

Information for this article was contributed by Mark Landler of The New York Times and by Edith M. Lederer, Julie Pace, Josh Lederman, George Jahn, Zeina Karam and staff members of The Associated Press.

A Section on 09/25/2014