Obama authority to order airstrikes in Syria. Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he would introduce a bill giving Mr. If he conducts airstrikes and does not get the desired effect, there’ll be pressure for more airstrikes, and then to put boots on the ground.” “There will be a clamor for the president to take military action, which may not be effective. “That pressure is often the enemy of good policy,” said Daniel Benjamin, a former State Department counterterrorism coordinator and now a scholar at Dartmouth College. Obama would be under extraordinary pressure to retaliate, there were arguments against striking back. Some current and former counterterrorism officials said that although Mr. Obama remained cautious about military strikes in Syria and that he was focused for now on developing a strategy and assembling a broad coalition of countries to deal with ISIS, one of several combatants in Syria’s three-year-old civil war.īut the harrowing images of Americans with knives to their throats have given the threat from ISIS an emotional resonance and stoked calls on Capitol Hill and elsewhere for Mr. Administration officials said he did not want to speak before intelligence agencies had authenticated the video. Obama did not address the killing before leaving for Estonia, where he plans to reassure Baltic NATO allies in the face of Russia’s incursions into Ukraine.
This indicates that the videos were probably made at different times, as does an apparent reference by the masked man to American airstrikes near the Iraqi town of Amerli, which the military carried out last weekend. The videotaped beheadings and threats by ISIS, which have followed its lightning conquest of broad areas of Syria and Iraq, have transformed the group into one of the most urgent threats facing a president who is also wrestling with crises from Ukraine to Gaza. Sotloff’s family issued a statement saying they believed he had been killed. Although the administration said it had not yet authenticated the video, members of Mr.
Sotloff, 31, came despite televised pleas from his mother to the leader of ISIS seeking mercy for her son, a freelance journalist who was captured in northern Syria a year ago. Obama’s decision to strike the group, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, in northern Iraq. Sotloff addresses the camera and describes himself as “paying the price” for Mr. Sotloff, is shown in the video kneeling like the previous victim, James Foley, while a masked figure stands above, wielding a knife. The video raised the pressure on the president to order military strikes on the group in its sanctuary in Syria. WASHINGTON - An Islamic militant group released a video on Tuesday showing the second beheading of an American hostage in two weeks and blamed President Obama for the killing.