Israel Plans To Attack ISIS If Militant Group Reaches Jordan
Israel is prepared to join the United States in an offensive against ISIS if the militant group were to reach neighboring Jordan, Israeli news outlets are reporting.
This week, U.S. President Barack Obama laid out the nation’s strategy for destroying the militant group that has taken over a wide swath of land stretching across Syria and Iraq. Obama called for U.S. airstrikes to continue and a broad coalition of nations join in the fight.
Now it appears Israel could be one joining the fray. The nation’s leaders reportedly believe that U.S. airstrikes are yielding results against ISIS, and is prepared to take its own action if the group moves eastward toward Jordan.
Israel has already been giving the United States intelligence and satellite images of ISIS positions, along with intel on Westerners joining the militant group.
Jordan has already joined a group of 10 Middle Eastern nations backing Obama in the fight against ISIS. Others include Egypt, Lebanon, and Sunni states in the Persian Gulf.
Steven Sotloff, a journalist murdered by ISIS militants last month, held dual citizenship in the United States and Israel. After Sotloff’s death, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu send condolences to the journalist’s family and said he was killed because militants saw him “as a symbol of the West, the same culture that extremist Islam wishes to annihilate.”
After a lighting fast push across the Middle East that saw ISIS take Mosul and other key areas of Iraq, the group has been slowly pushed back due largely to Kurdish forces in Northern Iraq. The fighters from the largely autonomous region of Iraq have gotten support not only from the United States but other Western Nations including Israel.
But ISIS still aims to push its territory, threatening Western nations. In an early message, a now-killed ISIS spokesman vowed to “raise the flag of Islam over the White House,” and the group has reportedly been discussion infiltrating the United States through the southern border with Mexico.
There is evidence that ISIS is moving toward Israel as well, with sightings of the group’s members operating in the Gaza Strip.
