Obama: ISIS Can Become 'A Manageable Problem'

President Barack Obama said that ISIS can be shrunk to “a manageable problem” if the international community works to “isolate” it on Wednesday. 

“If we are joined by the international community, we can continue to shrink ISIL’s sphere of influence, its effectiveness, its financing, its military capabilities, to the point where it is a manageable problem…what we’ve got to do is make sure that we are organizing the Arab world, the Middle East, the Muslim world, along with the international community, to isolate this cancer,” Obama stated.

The president also declared that ISIS is “first and foremost destructive to the Muslim world and the Arab world and North Africa, and the people who live there. They’re the ones who are most severely affected …  and we’ve got to combat it in a sustained, effective way.”

He further claimed that the US knew that terrorist groups outside of al-Qaeda such as ISIS were a threat, saying “one of the concerns that we have had is the development of terrorist networks and organizations, separate and apart from al-Qaeda … we’ve seen ISIS to be the first one that has broken through, but we anticipated this a while back, and it was reflected in my West Point speech.”

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