Australia Opens Regional Summit to Fight Terrorism

Local Editor

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott Thursday urged Asia-Pacific nations to help fight extremist groups as he opened a regional summit on the issue with a warning that "ISIL" has global ambitions.

Abbott told the conference - attended by ministers and representatives of 30 nations as well as well as tech giants Facebook, Twitter and Google - that it was crucial to find methods to tackle the ideology of extremist groups that have drawn thousands of foreign fighters to Iraq and Syria.

"You can't negotiate with an entity like this, you can only fight it," he said of the "ISIL" terrorist group, adding that "this is not terrorism for a local grievance, this is terrorism with global ambitions".

"The only really effective defense against terrorism is persuading people that it's pointless," Abbott said.

"We need idealistic young people to appreciate that joining this death cult "ISIL" is an utterly misguided and wrong-headed way to express their desire to sacrifice. How this is best done is, of course, the work of this conference."

The two-day summit comes as US President Barack Obama approves the deployment of 450 more military trainers to Iraq, joining an already 3,100 mission in the nation.

The Sydney gathering follows a similar summit in Washington in February where Obama said nations had to tackle the root causes driving recruitment to such groups.

But the three days of talks did not spell out concrete steps on what measures would be taken.
Topics set to be discussed at the Australian summit include working with social media, industry and civil society groups, combatting terrorist propaganda and the involvement of women and families in any measures.

Australia raised its threat level to high last September and carried out a series of counter-terrorism raids.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team