Paris attacks: At G20, Obama vows renewed effort to eliminate ISIS

PRESIDENT of the United States of America (USA), Barack Obama vowed yester­day to step up efforts to elim­inate Islamic State in Syria and prevent it from carrying out attacks like those in Paris. This is just as European lead­ers urged Russia to focus its military efforts on the radical Islamists.
Speaking at a G20 leaders’ summit in Turkey, Obama described the killings in Paris, for which the Islamic State has claimed respon­sibility, as an attack on the civilised world and said the United States would work with France to hunt down those responsible. The two-day summit brings Obama and fellow world leaders just 500km (310 miles) from Syr­ia, where a 4-1/2-year con­flict has transformed Islamic State into a global security threat and spawned Europe’s largest migration flows since World War Two.
“The skies have been darkened by the horrific at­tacks that took place in Paris just a day and a half ago,” Obama said after meeting Turkish President, Tayyip Erdogan.
“We will redouble our ef­forts, working with other members of the coalition, to bring about a peaceful tran­sition in Syria and to elimi­nate Daesh as a force that can create so much pain and suffering for people in Paris, in Ankara, and in other parts of the globe,” he added, us­ing an alternative name for Islamic State. Obama and his Western allies now face the question of how the West should respond after Islamic State again demonstrated it posed a threat far beyond its strongholds in Syria and Iraq.