Obama Says Underestimated ISIL, Qaeda Says West Will Be Attacked
TEHRAN (Tasnim) - The head of Syria's al-Qaeda branch said militants will attack the West in retaliation for US-led air strikes in Syria and Iraq, and President Barack Obama acknowledged US intelligence had underestimated the rise of ISIL fighters.
The head of Syria's al-Qaeda branch, the Nusra Front which is a rival of ISIL and has also been targeted by US strikes, said militants would carry out attacks on the West in retaliation for the campaign.
"Muslims will not watch while their sons are bombed. Your leaders will not be the only ones who would pay the price of the war. You will pay the heaviest price," Abu Mohamad al-Golani said in an audio message posted on pro-Nusra forums.
Obama has worked since August to build an international coalition to combat the fighters, describing them last week in an address to the United Nations as a "network of death".
His acknowledgment in an interview broadcast on Sunday that US intelligence had underestimated ISIL offered an explanation for why Washington appeared to have been taken by surprise when the fighters surged through northern Iraq in June, Reuters reported.
The militants had gone underground when US forces quashed al-Qaeda in Iraq with the aid of local tribes during the US war there which ended in 2011, Obama told CBS's "60 Minutes".
"But over the past couple of years, during the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swathes of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos."
The ISIL's advance has not been halted in Syria, where it is fighting Kurdish forces near the border city of Kobani, where 140,000 refugees fled a week ago.