U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, acknowledges that "ground troops are necessary" to defeat the Islamic State, but "they're not going to be American ground troops."
"The President has been very clear: the form of struggle against ISIL is not going to look like the deployment of thousands of American ground troops and so forth. Right now we do have some troops on the ground but they're performing a training and advising role.
"Ground troops are necessary but they are not going to be American ground troops. You have to get the Iraqis and ultimately the Syrian moderate opposition groups up so they can fight the fight on the ground.
"There has to be a fight on the ground. You can't do this by air. Everybody acknowledges that.
"We also saw having deployed so many troops over so many years that unless the Iraqis congeal and have a kind of inclusive political system and have the military capability on the ground, anything we do is going to be stop gap.
"So it requires more patience and it's really is going to require more time because the troops are not in a state yet to do the full rollback and to sustain the gains that they make. But they have to get there. There's no work around the fact that the Iraqi army has to be the central part of this solution," Power said.
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