Disagreements among US-led coalition threaten to weaken fight against IS

Strategic differences and disagreements among US-led coalition combating the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is threatening to weaken the fight against the extremist group.

While US President Barack Obama has been successful in forming a coalition, including five Arab countries to fight the Islamic State group, serious disagreements remain, particularly over the coalition's plan for Syria and whether the fight against Islamic State militants there will strengthen or weaken Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad in the long run, the Washington Times reports.

Addressing a session at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Tuesday, where military chiefs from the US and 21 other countries gathered to discuss the campaign, Obama said that it was going to be a long-term campaign with "periods of progress and setbacks."

Deeming the military summit as "a positive step" in terms of coordinating tactical operations against the Islamic State, Shadi Hamid, a Middle East scholar with the Brookings Institution in Washington, however warned it was unlikely to resolve deeper divisions, especially regarding desired outcomes for Syria's long-running civil war.

He said that the coalition partners had different conceptions about the regional order and did not agree on what the primary threat was.

Richard Fontaine, president of the Center for a New American Security, a think tank in Washington, said the Obama administration has successfully built the coalition based on the singular goal of defeating the Islamic State.

He said that fighting the Islamic State was the unifying mission that all these coalition partners agreed on, but unity was likely to break when they had to take other decisions.