TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Western powers are coming under mounting pressure to do more to confront Islamic State (ISIS) in its stronghold in Syria, as the heavily armed militants edged closer to taking an important air base that would cement their domination over a swath of the country's north.
As US aircraft continued to pound the Islamist militants in northern Iraq, the Obama administration was studying a range of options for pressuring Isis in Syria, primarily through training "moderate" Syrian rebels as a proxy force, with air strikes as a possible backup.
Leaders in Washington and London are adamant they will not collaborate with the regime of Bashar al-Assad in tackling their common enemy, and on Friday the Pentagon insisted that it had yet to decide on whether to expand the US air war into Syria.
But Isis has demonstrated its rampant authority in northern Syria in recent days, with the brazen murder of the US hostage James Foley and a series of attacks on towns and villages in the north, including the vital airbase at Taqba, where it has surrounded a detachment of Syrian army soldiers. It now holds a swath of territory in Syria and Iraq that is larger than the UK and home to at least four million people.
"The Islamic State is now the most capable military power in the Middle East outside Israel," a senior regional diplomat said on Friday as quoted by The Guardian.
US officials have conceded that 93 air strikes in Iraq that have checked the Isis advance in the past 10 days will not deal definitively with the jihadis, and that they will have to be confronted in Syria to be fully defeated.
No consensus yet exists as to what that will require the US to do. Deliberations within the administration are said to be ongoing, the result of both an attempt to build an international coalition and a deep wariness of becoming mired in an open-ended conflict.
THE GUARDIAN