Obama to reveal plans on ISIL

US President Barack Obama will set out his plan against the ISIL Takfiri militants in a speech on Wednesday.

“On Wednesday, I’ll make a speech and describe what our game plan’s going to be going forward,” Obama told NBC television.

He faced criticism last month for saying his administration did not “have a strategy yet” to fight the extremist militant group.

Obama told NBC television that “I just want the American people to understand the nature of the threat and how we’re going to deal with it and to have confidence that we’ll be able to deal with it.”

The group has taken large swathes of territory in both Syria and Iraq. The US military has conducted over 130 airstrikes against the Takfiri group in Iraq in the past month. The group recently beheaded two US journalists it had taken captive in Syria.

The US began targeting the group only after it began advancing in northern Iraq near the city of Erbil in August 2014. The terrorist group emerged in Syria three years ago fighting with the government of President Basher al-Asad, The US has diplomats and troops in the area which has some of Iraq’s richest oil lands.

The US new plan is largely dependent on cooperation from regional US allies including Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Turkey who have played a major role for the emergence and empowerment of the militant group in Syria.

In June 2014, an independent news website, WND, reported that “Syrian rebels who would later join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS, were trained in 2012 by US instructors working at a secret base in Jordan, according to informed Jordanian officials.”

“The officials said dozens of future ISIS members were trained at the time as part of covert aid to the insurgents targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The Jordanian officials said all ISIS members who received US training to fight in Syria were first vetted for any links to extremist groups like al-Qaida.”

US senator Rand Paul said few months ago that the extremist group would not be empowered in Iraq if the US did not Provided it with safe haven in Syria.

“I think that President Obama’s support for the Islamic rebels has allowed ISIS to grow stronger in Syria … They never would have grown this strong without … their allies getting weapons from both us, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, so really, we have done a disservice and created chaos that has allowed the jihadists to grow stronger.”