ABU DHABI: The United States is seeking new military, counter-terrorism and diplomatic ideas to destroy the militant Islamic State group faster, Secretary of State John Kerry said on Monday, acknowledging the difficulty in eliminating extremists who have exploited four years of chaos in the Middle East to become a global threat.

He said greater military cooperation with Russia was possible under the right circumstances.

Kerry spoke between meetings with senior Arab officials in the United Arab Emirates, and as the Belgian capital of Brussels was in virtual lockdown over terror threats a continent away.

President Barack Obama’s administration faces pressure at home and abroad to step up the fight against the IS after its Nov 13 attack in Paris killed 130 people. Obama meets French President Francois Hollande in Washington on Tuesday. “The key is to destroy Daesh rapidly in Syria and in Iraq,” Kerry told reporters, using an alternative term for the IS.

“I’d like to see us go faster,” he said.

“The president would like to see us go faster”. The chief American diplomat said Obama was asking everyone in the US government for new concepts to speed up the fight.

Some steps were in motion before the Paris attack, he said, such as the decision to deploy some US special forces to Syria and ongoing efforts toward a cease-fire between Syria’s government and rebel groups.

But Kerry didn’t outline any specific post-Paris additions to the strategy. He made no mention of any country authorising a large-scale deployment of boots on the ground to Syria, as some Republican presidential candidates have suggested.

Published in Dawn, November 24th, 2015