Obama seeks a Sunni coalition to defeat the Islamic State
(The Christian Science Monitor) The last thing the United States wants to see as a result of President Obama’s plan to defeat the Islamic State is a spreading suspicion that the U.S. is in a fight with Sunni Islam.
So a critical component of the administration’s game plan is to enlist Sunni Arab countries as a key part of the international—though so far largely Western—coalition that will aim to roll back and ultimately destroy the extremist Sunni-Islamist militant group in control of a broad swath of Syria and Iraq.
The effort to recruit Sunni Arabs to the cause is already under way, with Secretary of State John Kerry in Jordan and Saudi Arabia this week—in part to see what roles the Sunni Arab powers in the region can play, but also to press harder for the spigots of financial support to the militant group to be turned off.
