U.S. intelligence officials "underestimated" the threat posed by the Islamic State inside Syria, which has become "ground zero" for jihadists worldwide, and overestimated the Iraqi army's ability to defeat the militant group, President Barack Obama admitted in a CBS interview broadcast on Sunday.
In a wide-ranging interview on CBS' "60 Minutes" with correspondent Steve Kroft, Obama said the United States had grossly "underestimated" the ISIS militants' capacity to regroup under the disguise of the Syrian civil war after being squashed in Iraq, Reuters reported.
"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.
ISIS is "sort of a hybrid of not just the terrorist network, but one with territorial ambitions, and some of the strategy and tactics of an army," Obama said.
Citing earlier comments by James Clapper, director of national intelligence, the president acknowledged that the U.S. intelligence underestimated what had been taking place in Syria, New York Daily News reported.
"I didn't see the collapse of the Iraqi security force in the north coming," Clapper was quoted as saying to a Washington Post columnist this month. "I didn't see that. It boils down to predicting the will to fight, which is an imponderable."
The threat from ISIS and other terror groups are a more "immediate concern that has to be dealt with," Obama added. "On the other hand, in terms of immediate threats to the United States, ISIL, Khorasan Group - those folks could kill Americans," he said.
"The Islamic State group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has taken control of large sections of Iraq and Syria. The Khorasan Group is a cell of militants that the U.S. says is plotting attacks against the West in cooperation with the Nusra front, Syria's Al Qaeda affiliate," according to Fox News.
In addition, the terrorist group's savvy propaganda machine has managed to "attract foreign fighters who believed in their jihadist nonsense and traveled everywhere from Europe to the United States to Australia to other parts of the Muslim world," Obama said, adding that as many as 40,000 fighters have reportedly sworn allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's goal of creating a new Islamic caliphate.
Obama also hinted at how other superpowers had failed to stand up despite being part of a large international coalition.
"That's always the case. America leads," he said. "We are the indispensable nation. We have capacity no one else has. Our military is the best in the history of the world. And when trouble comes up anywhere in the world, they don't call Beijing. They don't call Moscow. They call us."
"When there's a typhoon in the Philippines, take a look at who's helping the Philippines deal with that situation," the president said. "When there's an earthquake in Haiti, take a look at who's leading the charge and making sure Haiti can rebuild."
Meanwhile, Obama also recognized the contradiction of how the U.S.-led military campaign against ISIS is helping the rule of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has been accused of war crimes by the United Nations.
"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."
Specifically, both Iraq and Syria require a political solution for gaining peace in the long term, Obama concluded.
"I think there's going to be a generational challenge. I don't think that this is something that's going to happen overnight," Obama said, citing an environment in which young men "are more concerned whether they're Shia or Sunni, rather than whether they are getting a good education or a good job."
"What our military operations can do is to just check and roll back these (militant) networks as they appear and make sure that the time and space is provided for a new way of doing things to begin to take root."
