DOHA: The self-styled Islamic State (IS) is a “global threat” which will take a generation or more to defeat, Washington’s envoy for the US-led coalition fighting the militant group said on Wednesday.

General John Allen conceded that the fight against IS — or Daesh as he called it — would continue for several years in a keynote speech to the US-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar.

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He added that if IS was not defeated it could “wreak havoc on the progress of humanity”.

“This will be a long campaign,” he said. “Defeating Daesh’s ideology will likely take a generation or more. But we can and we must rise to this challenge.

“In an age when we are more interconnected that at any other time in human history, Daesh is a global threat.”

Gen Allen added that IS posed a new type of threat because of its “depravity”.

Published in Dawn, June 4th, 2015

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