Obama calls criticism of US strategy against IS legitimate

US President Barack Obama says criticism of his strategy to combat the Islamic State group is legitimate and failure to keep the public informed has contributed to fears that not enough is being done.

In a year-end interview with NPR News, Obama says the most damage the group can do to the US is to force Americans to change how they live or what they believe in.

“I think that there is a legitimate criticism of what I’ve been doing and our administration has been doing in the sense that we haven’t, you know, on a regular basis I think described all the work that we’ve been doing for more than a year now to defeat ISIL,” the president says in the interview released Monday, referring to IS by one of its acronyms.

Obama says that if people don’t know about the thousands of airstrikes that have been launched against IS targets since August 2014, or aren’t aware that towns in Iraq once controlled by the group have been retaken, “then they might feel as if there’s not enough of a response.”

“And so part of our goal here is to make sure that people are informed about all the actions that we’re taking,” he says.

The full interview is here:

— AP