U.S. senior official. “The Syria policy people are so focused on taking down Assad, they were blind to this problem.”
By late last year, classified American intelligence reports painted an
increasingly ominous picture of a growing threat from Sunni extremists
in Syria,
according to senior intelligence and military officials. Just as
worrisome, they said, were reports of deteriorating readiness and morale
among troops next door in Iraq.
But
the reports, they said, generated little attention in a White House
consumed with multiple brush fires and reluctant to be drawn back into
Iraq. “Some of us were pushing the reporting, but the White House just
didn’t pay attention to it,” said a senior American intelligence
official. “They were preoccupied with other crises,” the official added.
“This just wasn’t a big priority.”
The
White House denies that, but the threat certainly has its attention now
as American warplanes pound the extremist group calling itself the
Islamic State in hopes of reversing its lightning-swift seizing of
territory in Iraq and Syria. Still, even as bombs fall from the sky
thousands of miles away, the question of how it failed to anticipate the
rise of a militant force that in the space of a few months has redrawn
the map of the Middle East resonates inside and outside the Obama
administration.
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