Skip to footer

Islamic State 101: What the US is doing to counter the threat

Pentagon officials have a mantra when it comes to taking on the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL: The US military may be able to use American weapons to blunt the advance of IS, but any lasting change will have to come through political reform.

5. Who is in the coalition so far?

  • By Anna Mulrine

Eight nations have stepped up provide arms to the Kurdish peshmerga forces in Iraq, including Albania, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK.

But putting together a coalition for any potential military action in Syria is a bigger challenge, chiefly due to domestic political concerns.

“It’s why I have conversations with my European colleagues,” Dempsey said, “which I think is actually more threatened [by IS] in the near term than we are.” 

That said, he added, the US must also play a “leadership role, to build coalitions, to provide the unique capabilities that we can provide – but not necessarily all of the capabilities – to work through this.” 

In the meantime, the Pentagon has asked Congress for $500 million to move forward on “a train-and-equip program for a moderate Syrian opposition,” Kirby says. “We hope to get that authorized and appropriated for fiscal year ’15, which is coming up here pretty soon.”

5 of 5
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.