US trying to speed up efforts to defeat Daesh: Kerry

Abu Dhabi - Shaikh Mohammed bin Zayed receives US Secretary of State in Abu Dhabi, discusses situation in Syria.

The United States is seeking new military, counterterrorism and diplomatic ideas to destroy the Daesh group faster, Secretary of State John Kerry said on Monday, acknowledging the difficulty in eliminating extremists who've 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 UAE, and as the Belgian capital of Brussels was in virtual lockdown over terror threats a continent away.
"The key is to destroy Daesh rapidly in Syria and in Iraq," Kerry told reporters.
"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 ceasefire 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. And he dismissed the notion of a no-fly zone in Syria, proposed just last week by his predecessor as secretary of state, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. He said it was "not a new idea."
Kerry didn't rule out greater cooperation with Russia, which Hollande is expected to ask Obama about. Obama and other US official say Russia must first limit airstrikes to the Daesh and other extremist groups, and not Western-backed, moderate forces.
If rebels see new cooperation with Russia as designed to keep Syrian President Bashar Assad in power, "that complicates issues, and then you will have greater support going to bad actors."
"It has to be done in a way that manages the passions and the disappointment and the sacrifices and the anger that exists on the ground among people who have been fighting Assad for four years now," Kerry said. "You have to do this in a way that actually brings them to the ceasefire."
Kerry said Daesh militants "are losing territory, they are losing towns, they are losing people, they are losing oil revenue." But they're gaining support from other terrorist groups around the world, making defeating them more urgent.
"We have to cut off this notion of success," he said, by which Daesh "gets a cheapie: Someone who already is a terrorist does something in their name."
Kerry was clearest in outlining his focus in the overall strategy: Getting Assad and moderate rebels into a political transition process.
A truce could be a couple of weeks away, he insisted, even if several matters remain unresolved. For one, the plan doesn't say when Assad might leave power. And no agreement has been reached on which fighting forces, beyond Daesh and the Al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, would be barred from participating.
Kerry said discussions on Monday with His Highness Shaikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of UAE Armed Forces, and Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al Jubeir touched on Ahrar Ash Sham, which has support from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey back the hard-line Islamist force; Assad's government and its defenders, Iran and Russia, see it as a terrorist entity.

• MENA