US President Barack Obama said the terrorist threat was never restricted to South Asia, or to Afghanistan, or Pakistan. Even as al Qaeda has been decimated in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the threat from terrorists metastasized in other parts of the Middle East and North Africa, the White House reported.

While at the Tampa military installation, Obama said "There’s been a debate about Daesh that’s focused on whether a continued U.S. troop presence in Iraq back in 2011 could have stopped the threat of Daesh from growing. And as a practical matter, this was not an option. By 2011, Iraqis wanted our military presence to end, and they were unwilling to sign a new Status of Forces Agreement to protect our troops from prosecution if they were trying to defend themselves in Iraq." 

"In addition, maintaining American troops in Iraq at the time could not have reversed the forces that contributed to Daesh’s rise -- a government in Baghdad that pursued a sectarian agenda, a brutal dictator in Syria who lost control of large parts of the country, social media that reached a global pool of recruits, and a hollowing out of Iraq’s security forces, which were ultimately overrun in Mosul in 2014," Obama said.

Source: MENA