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US wins pledge for more resources from anti-IS allies

STUTTGART — An international coalition leading the military campaign against Islamic State (IS) has agreed to accelerate its contributions, but did not publicly specify what those would be. The coalition also called on Iraqi leaders to reconcile political differences.

STUTTGART — An international coalition leading the military campaign against Islamic State (IS) has agreed to accelerate its contributions, but did not publicly specify what those would be. The coalition also called on Iraqi leaders to reconcile political differences.

The promise followed a meeting in Stuttgart of Defence Ministers from countries involved in the anti-IS coalition, on Wednesday night, during which United States Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter drove home the message that to deal IS a body blow, “all must do more”.

Mr Carter’s call to step up the fight came a week after US President Barack Obama reiterated a long-standing demand for members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to increase their defence spending to meet the alliance’s target of 2 per cent of output.

Meanwhile, an Australian who had recruited for IS in the Middle East, and urged fellow Australians to commit terrorist attacks at home, has been killed in an American airstrike in Iraq, said officials yesterday.

Neil Prakash, whom Australian Attorney General George Brandis called the most dangerous Australian involved with the extremist group, was killed in the city of Mosul on April 29, said the politician.

The former rapper of Cambodian and Fijian heritage from Melbourne had “appeared in IS propaganda videos and magazines and has actively recruited Australian men, women and children, and encouraged acts of terrorism”, said Mr Brandis in a statement.

About 110 Australians overseas are believed to be fighting for IS or actively supporting the group, according to the Australian government, which is part of the US-led effort to fight the extremists.

Prakash left Australia in 2013 and had been based mostly in the Syrian city of Raqqa, said officials.

On Tuesday, a US Navy Seal was killed in small arms fire with IS forces in northern Iraq, prompting Mr Carter to mention him during a news conference in Stuttgart the next day.

Mr Carter said that as the war intensifies, “these risks will continue”, naming the man as Petty Officer First Class Charles Keating.

“We also agreed that all of our friends and allies across the counter-IS coalition can and must do more as well, both to confront IS in Iraq and Syria and its metastases elsewhere,” he said.

The talks included ministers from France, Britain and Germany, and were planned well in advance of Tuesday’s attack, in which IS fighters blasted through Kurdish defences and overran a town.

The elite serviceman was the third American to be killed in direct combat since the US-led coalition launched a campaign in 2014 to “degrade and destroy” IS, and is a measure of its deepening involvement in the conflict.

In mid-April, the US announced plans to send an additional 200 troops to Iraq and put them closer to the frontlines of battle to advise Iraqi forces.

Then, in late April, Mr Obama announced he would send an additional 250 special operations forces to Syria, greatly expanding the US presence on the ground there to help draw in more Syrian fighters to combat IS. AGENCIES

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