Will announce ISIS strategy

Obama says he will announce details in a speech on the U.S. strategy for tackling the threat of ISIS:

What I’m going to be asking the American people to understand is, number one, this is a serious threat. Number two, we have the capacity to deal with it.

The strategy won’t include boots on the ground in Syria but will focus on cooperation with ‘regional partners’ like Iraqi and Kurdish forces and Syrian rebel troops to degrade ISIS’s capacities.

This is not the equivalent of the Iraq war …Over the course of months, we are going to be able to not just blunt the momentum of ISIS. We are going to systematically degrade their capabilities. We’re going to shrink the territory that they control. And that’s how we’re going to defeat them.

He says there is no immediate intelligence indicating the group – also known as Islamic State – is planning attacks on U.S. soil, but that if it continues to recruit foreign fighters, it could pose a domestic threat. The U.S. also needs to be aware of ISIS’s social media capacity and its ability to recruit via the internet. Ultimately, the strategy will include going after ISIS targets:

The strategy both for Iraq and for Syria is that we will hunt down ISIS members and assets wherever they are. I will reserve the right to always protect the American people and go after folks who are trying to hurt us wherever they are.