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19:44 GMT
WASHINGTON, Nov 22 (KUNA) -- White House Special Envoy to the Global Coalition to Combat ISIL Brett McGurk has stressed that US Special Forces will take part in the lines of Syrian coalition forces towards Raqqa city.
"We're not going to preview when they're going to get in. Obviously, that -- those are -- that is sensitive information. But they will be going in, and they will be organizing the forces. And, in fact, the forces that they will be working with have been doing a very successful operation," he told US CBS channel in an interview on Sunday.
They have taken back about 1,100 square kilometers just in the last two weeks, he added, noting that they have killed about 300 ISIL fighters.
He said: "This is focused on isolating the capital of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Raqqa, where we think a lot of these plots are being hatched.
"But we welcome Russia's efforts against ISIL. And that is something that we want them to very much focus on. But in Vienna, over the last two weeks, ... for the first time in the history -- and since this Syrian civil war started four years ago, we now have all the players around a table, the Russians, the Saudis, the Iranians, all permanent members of the U.N. Security Council," he said.
"And they have agreed on a road map, an 18-month road map for a political transition, and also to put in place a cease-fire, because what we want to do, and we have been working with the Russians on this very closely, what we want to do is have a cease-fire against the moderate opposition and the regime so we can focus on the real threat of ISIL.
"However, that is not going to happen, we can't get to a cease-fire unless we have a credible political transition process that will lead to Assad stepping aside for a new and inclusive government," he noted.
Meanwhile, former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel called on the world's countries to focus on common interests and combat ISIL.
In an interview with CNN, Hagel said that the US administration should determine its political strategy to be in line with militarism, referring to the situation in Syria and the future of Bashar al-Assad.
He said that there is no place for al-Assad in Syria, warning that the main danger is ISIL, which poses a grave threat to the whole world.
"First, we need to help build a stability, a platform of stability, before we're going to be able to resolve anything. And we can keep killing people. We can keep playing a proxy war game and destroying the Middle East and seeing the results of that, refugees and other very clear consequences of that kind of an effort," he said.
"We are going to have differences with Iran for years and years, with Russia for years.
"But you can't let those differences dictate -- or you can't become captive to the differences. Let's center on the core threat, the common threat. Build out from there. If you can build some platform of stability, that gets you to a point where you can start to maybe unravel some of this. All the countries of the Middle East are going to have to be part of this.
"But what is happening here is that it is completely out of control, and there's no prospect for bringing any kind of stability, I think, on the path we're on now. And that was what I was talking about in the memo," he added.
On his part, Former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told NBC that the United States has not provided strong enough leadership in the battle to defeat ISIS, saying the US has to lead in this effort because what we've learned a long time ago is that if the United States does not lead, nobody else will.
"We need to set a Joint Command Center where all of these countries are together on their objectives. And secondly, we need to increase our effort there, we need to increase the tempo of our air strikes, we need to organize ground forces, particularly, the Sunnis and the Kurds and arm them so that they can take territory back from ISIS. And frankly, we need to increase Special Forces and our intelligence advisors, not only to guide these forces, but to go with them in order to ensure that we are successful in this effort," he added.
"I think that the resources applied to that mission, frankly, have not been sufficient to confront that," he said.
The former administration official repeated his call for NATO to get more involved in creating the coalition needed to fight ISIS. "I do not trust Russia or Iran to participate in those efforts," he said. (end)
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