Barack Obama says Syria is 'ground zero for jihadists around the world'

Photograph: Zuma Press, Inc. / Alamy/Alamy

President Barack Obama has said that US intelligence agencies underestimated Islamic State (Isis) activity inside Syria, which has become 'ground zero' for jihadist terrorists worldwide, while overestimating the ability of the Iraqi army to fight such militant groups.

The president's words, extracted from a CBS interview that was scheduled for broadcast on Sunday, came as further US-led airstrikes were carried out in Syria and Iraq and John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, called for a ground war against Isis. The interview, for the 60 Minutes programme, was taped on Friday.

Citing comments by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, to the Washington Post earlier this month, Obama said US intelligence underestimated what had been taking place in Syria after Islamic militants went underground when US marines defeated al-Qaida in Iraq with help from Iraqi tribes.

'But over the past couple of years, during the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swaths of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos,' Obama said. 'And so this became ground zero for jihadists around the world.'

Clapper was quoted by the Post as saying: 'I didn't see the collapse of the Iraqi security force in the north coming. I didn't see that. It boils down to predicting the will to fight, which is an imponderable.'

Obama's admission that Isis managed to set up its bases in Syria and Iraq under the noses of the world's most powerful intelligence services runs the risk of emboldening Republican hawks who have been complaining for months that the administration was being too passive in its handling of the Syrian civil war.

The former Republican presidential candidate John McCain has been particularly caustic in his criticism of Obama's policy in the Middle East, ridiculing it for being even worse that Jimmy Carter's.

Isis controls large areas of Syria and northern Iraq and has killed thousands of people. The beheadings of two American journalists and one British aid worker by Isis militants have shocked the world.

US air strikes on Iraq began on 8 August, and more than 200 have since been carried out. Strikes on Syria, by a coalition which includes Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, began on Tuesday.

Speaking to CBS, Obama outlined his military goal against Isis: 'We just have to push them back, and shrink their space, and go after their command and control, and their capacity, and their weapons, and their fueling, and cut off their financing, and work to eliminate the flow of foreign fighters.'

He also said a political solution was necessary in both Iraq and Syria for peace in the long term.

The interview was scheduled to be broadcast in full on Sunday night.