President François Hollande said during a visit to Baghdad Friday that France is ready to step up military assistance for Iraq, as global efforts intensified to defeat Islamic State jihadists, reports Yahoo! News.
It was the highest-profile visit to Iraq since IS-led militants overran large parts of the country in June and sparked international concern over an expanding jihadist threat.
Hollande touched down hours after Washington secured commitments from 10 Arab states to help stamp out IS, which the Central Intelligence Agency has said has as many as 30,000 fighters in Syria and Iraq.
The United States, which pulled its troops out of Iraq in 2011, began a campaign of air strikes against the group last month.
President Barack Obama vowed this week to expand operations, including to Syria, and the Pentagon said combat aircraft would soon start flying out of a base in the country's north.
Obama is seeking to build a broad coalition to defeat IS, which has declared a caliphate straddling Iraq and Syria, attacked minorities, posted videos of gruesome beheadings online and vowed to take the fight to the West.
Read more of this AFP report published by Yahoo! News.