The United States says it is “comfortable” it can forge an international coalition to fight Islamic State, but with Western and Middle Eastern allies hesitant, it risks finding itself out on a limb.
President Barack Obama last week unveiled a rough plan to fight the Islamist militants simultaneously in Iraq and Syria, thrusting the United States directly into two different wars in which nearly every country in the region has a stake.
The broad concept of a coalition has been accepted in Western capitals and on Thursday 10 Arab states, including rivals Saudi Arabia and Qatar, signed up to a “co-ordinated military campaign.”
“I’m comfortable that this will be a broad-based coalition with Arab nations, European nations, the United States, others,” US Secretary of State John Kerry said in Ankara on Friday.
But he added it was “premature” to set out what tasks individual coalition partners would shoulder. And the devil could be in the details.
“This coalition has to be efficient and targeted,” said a senior French diplomat. “We have to keep our autonomy. We don’t want to be the United States’ subcontractor. For the moment they haven’t made their intentions clear to us.”
The US and Britain pulled out of striking Syrian President Bashar al-Assad last year hours before French planes had been due to take off, leaving President Francois Hollande embarrassed and isolated.
