Top House lawmakers call for Syria strikes

The leaders of the House Foreign Affairs Committee urged President Obama on Tuesday to launch strikes against members of an Islamic militant group operating in Syria.

Although Obama has authorized surveillance missions over Syria to monitor the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the president has been reluctant to target the group there directly, as he’s done in Iraq.

{mosads}Reps. Ed Royce (R-Calif.), panel chairman, and Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), the committee’s ranking member, said the threat posed by ISIS merits an expansion of those strikes into Syria.

“Target them and target the terrorist training camp where they’re bringing thousands of fighters from around the world, putting them through training over a period of weeks to teach them how to conduct terrorist activities,” Royce said in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “Those camps and the munitions should be targeted as well.”

Appearing on the same program, Engel agreed.

“ISIS is obviously across the border, into Syria and into Iraq, and they really have to be defeated,” Engel said.

The president faced growing pressure on Tuesday to intensify U.S. operations against ISIS after the group released a video that apparently shows the execution of a second American journalist, Steven Joel Sotloff.

For weeks, U.S. forces have conducted airstrikes against ISIS militants operating in Iraq, but they haven’t extended those attacks into Syria, largely out of concern that the United States could inadvertently help Syrian President Bashar Assad amid a three-year-old civil war. 

Instead, Obama last month approved reconnaissance flights over Syria, involving both drones and manned aircraft.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Tuesday that Obama is still at work developing a strategy for countering ISIS, also known as ISIL, in Syria. That strategy, he emphasized, “may include the use of military force.”

“The president has been at work over the last several weeks working closely with his national security team to develop military options for taking the fight to ISIL in Syria,” Earnest told reporters.

“The president is only going to do this consistent with our broader strategy for dealing with ISIL. That includes supporting the Iraqi government, engaging regional governments in this effort, ramping up our assistance to Iraqi and Kurdish security forces [and] marshaling the support of the international community in this effort,” he added.

His comments arrive a day after the administration launched direct strikes against suspected terrorist groups operating in Somalia.

Asked about the strategic distinction between Somalia and Syria, Earnest said the United States simply has a better working relationship with the Somali government when it comes to fighting terrorism.

“Our track record of acting in Somalia in support of a broader international coalition … to counter the terror threat in Somalia is good,” Earnest said. “The situation in Syria is altogether different.”

As Obama moves toward solidifying his plan, Engel is calling for bolstering aid to the Free Syria Army, which is battling both ISIS and Assad’s forces.

“They’re the only people in Syria — Assad’s regime is no good — they’re the only people in Syria that want to see democracy come to that poor beleaguered country,” he said.