It has also emerged that the group are less than six miles away from the Iraqi capital Baghdad.
President Obama has conceded that the U.S. "underestimated" the threat posed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) inside Syria, during a frank interview with CBS 60 Minutes on Sunday.
He said that, although al-Qaeda had been beaten by U.S. forces and Sunni tribes in Iraq, jihadists were able to take advantage of a power vacuum in eastern Syria, which became "ground zero" for militants and allowed them to regroup as ISIS.
President Obama said: "During the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swathes of the country completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos and attract foreign fighters... who believed in their jihadist nonsense."
He also admitted that the U.S. may have overestimated Iraq's U.S.-trained military's ability to combat ISIS in that country.
CBS 60 Minutes / Via youtube.com
Iraqi SWAT troopers clash with ISIS militants north of Muqdadiyah in Diyala province last week.
Stringer/Iraq / Reuters
Iraqi government forces, with the help of U.S.-led airstrikes, had held off ISIS militants in Amiriyat al-Fallujah.
But the ISIS insurgents have not retreated, and are situated less than 6 miles (10km) away from the Iraqi capital.
from BuzzFeed - Breaking http://ift.tt/YACwot
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