Local Editor

US President Barack Obama asserted on Wednesday that Washington will not be intimidated by the so-called "Islamic State" [IS] extremists following the beheading of a second American journalist and will build a coalition to "degrade and destroy" the group.

Obama still did not indicate a timeline for deciding on a strategy to go after the extremist group's operations in Syria.

"It'll take time to roll them back," said Obama at a Wednesday news conference during a visit to Europe.

Obama, under intense domestic pressure to set out his strategy for dealing with IS, said: "It is going to take time for us to form the regional coalition that's going to be required so that we can reach out to Sunni tribes in some of the areas that IS has occupied, and make sure that we have allies on the ground in combination with the air strikes that we've already conducted."

Obama said Washington was determined to halt the IS threat but warned it would depend on close cooperation with partners in the region.

He added, "We know that if we are joined by the international community, we can continue to shrink [IS's] sphere of influence, its effectiveness, its financing, its military capabilities."

"And the question is going to be making sure we've got the right strategy, but also making sure that we've got the international will to do it."

"Our objective is to make sure that IS is not an ongoing threat to the region," he claimed.

Obama's remarks came after he said the United States had verified the authenticity of a video released on Tuesday showing the beheading of freelance reporter Steven Sotloff, two weeks after journalist James Foley was similarly killed.

Sotloff, who held dual "Israeli" and American citizenship and free-lanced for Time and Foreign Policy magazines, vanished a year ago [2013] in Syria and was not seen again until he appeared in the video that showed Foley's beheading.

British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said on Wednesday that the masked, British-accented IS terrorist appears to be the same person shown in the Foley footage.

In the video, the organization threatens to kill another hostage, this one identified as a British citizen, David Cawthorne Haines. It was not immediately clear who Haines was.

The British foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, admitted that an attempt to rescue Haines earlier this year failed and that current British intelligence on his whereabouts is limited.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team