Specifically, senior Iraqi and Kurdish officials asked the United States as recently as this weekend to take action along the Iraqi-Syrian border to deprive ISIS of the safe havens it enjoys in that area. 
 
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 “The Iraqis have asked for assistance in the border regions, and that’s something we’re looking at,” one State Department official said. 
 
 The description of a calibrated military buildup by coalition forces, combined with a steady effort led by the United States Treasury Department to choke off ISIS’ ability to reap $1 million or more a day from oil sales, emerged as the administration has tried to define what Mr. Obama meant when he said the American goal was to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Sunni extremist group. 
 
 The president’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, provided the most current definition of White House thinking on Sunday during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Using an alternative acronym for the extremist group, he said that “success looks like an ISIL that no longer threatens our friends in the region, no longer threatens the United States, an ISIL that can’t accumulate followers or threaten Muslims in Syria, Iraq or otherwise.” 
 
 That definition falls short of the classic understanding of what it means to destroy an opposing force. But the administration is betting that it has tailored the goals to appeal to the coalition of oftentimes reluctant partners it is trying to assemble, many of whom are deeply suspicious of each other. 
 
 Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking from Paris, declined to say which states had offered to contribute air power, an announcement that White House officials said could await his return to testify in Congress early this week. State Department officials, who asked not to be identified under the agency’s protocol for briefing reporters, said Arab nations could participate in an air campaign against ISIS in other ways without dropping bombs, such as by flying arms to Iraqi or Kurdish forces, conducting reconnaissance flights or providing logistical support and refueling. 
 
 “I don’t want to leave you with the impression that these Arab members haven’t offered to do airstrikes, because several of them have,” one State Department official said. “The Iraqis would have to be a major participant in that decision,” the official added. “It has to be well structured and organized.” 
 
 The United Arab Emirates, which provided some air power in the 2011 attacks on Libya, seemed at the top of the list, with Qatar hosting an American military headquarters. American officials cautioned that all strikes would have to be approved by the newly assembled government in Iraq, as well as by American military planners. That could prove just one challenge to the offer by Arab nations to participate in airstrikes: While Iraq’s struggling military forces have experience operating with the United States, its Shiite-dominated government has never worked with the Sunni states of the Persian Gulf. 
 
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 The United States has identified ISIS targets in Iraq over the past several weeks. But officials said they were waiting, in part, to match the allied commitments with actual contributions: warplanes, support aircraft that can refuel or provide intelligence, more basing agreements to carry out strikes, and the insertion of trainers from other Western countries. 
 
 Tellingly, there are no plans, as of now, to increase the number of American attack planes in the region. The aircraft carrier Carl Vinson is scheduled to relieve the carrier George H. W. Bush in the Persian Gulf next month; if the Pentagon changed its plans and kept two carriers in the gulf, it could double carrier-based firepower over Iraq and Syria. But for now, there is no plan to do so, officials said. Nor are there any plans to increase American ground-based strike aircraft at facilities around the region, in hopes that Persian Gulf and European allies would make up the difference. 
 
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 Another striking feature of the American plan, officials said, was the deliberate exclusion of coordination with two other players with an interest — and some ability — to take on ISIS: the government of Iran and the forces of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who Mr. Obama declared three years ago was a brutal dictator who had to leave office. 
 
 Mr. Kerry has ruled out cooperative efforts with Iranian officials, who a senior administration official said last week are “looking for whatever leverage they can get” in the conflict in hopes of using it to lift pressure on their nuclear program. Iranian-backed militias were on the ground in the Iraqi town of Amerli recently and provided the muscle that Iraqi forces could not in ending a siege by ISIS. 
 
 While the administration insisted it would not work alongside Mr. Assad’s forces, the two sides were clearly working toward the same goal — leading to fears that the United States could essentially become Mr. Assad’s air force, at least temporarily, if it begins attacking ISIS emplacements in Syria. 
 
 As described by American officials, the battle strategy calls for assembling a force first in Iraq, where the Iraqi army would be guided by 12-man teams of American “advisers” that are expected to begin operating within days, and for new arms and other assistance for the Kurdish forces. Only later would the effort expand to Syria, and the administration is pressing for a congressional vote this week on a $500 million arms package for “moderate” members of the Syrian opposition, now aimed at ISIS rather than the Assad government. 
 
 Officials acknowledged that the so-called moderate rebel forces were fractured and far weaker than ISIS. Even so, administration officials struggled to explain whether the United States was at war with ISIS, as both the White House and the Pentagon spokesman said it was last week, or whether it was engaged in a more traditional counterterrorism action. That was how Mr. Kerry characterized the strategy in an effort to make it easier for Sunni states to explain to their own populations why they would be contributing forces against Sunni extremists. 
 
 “Originally this is not a war,” Mr. Kerry said on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” trying to separate it from the military action in 2003 that he had opposed as a senator. “This is not combat troops on the ground. It’s not hundreds of thousands of people.” He went on to compare it to “war with Al Qaeda and its affiliates,” and said that “in the same context” the United States was “at war with ISIL.” ||||| MINNEAPOLIS U.S. law enforcement is investigating a new phenomenon of women from the American heartland joining Islamic State as President Barack Obama vows to cut off the militants' recruiting at home. 
 
 At least three Somali families in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area have female relatives who have gone missing in the past six weeks and may have tried to join Islamic State, said community leader Abdirizak Bihi. He said that while the reasons for their disappearance were unclear, he had told the families to contact police. 
 
 In a separate case, a 19-year-old American Somali woman from St. Paul snuck away from her parents on Aug. 25 saying she was going to a bridal shower. Instead, she flew to Turkey and joined IS in Syria. 
 
 Home to the biggest Somali community in the United States, the Twin Cities area of Minnesota has been plagued by terrorist recruiting since the Somali group al-Shabaab began enlisting in America around 2007. 
 
 This year, law enforcement officials say they learned of 15-20 men with connections to the Minnesota Somali community fighting for extremist groups in Syria. They included Douglas McAuthur McCain, a convert to Islam, who was killed in battle this summer. 
 
 The St. Paul woman is the first case of an area female joining IS that has been made public although her family have asked for her name to be kept private because it fears retaliation from Islamists. 
 
 Greg Boosalis, FBI division counsel in Minneapolis, said law enforcement was investigating the possible recruitment in the area by Islamist extremists of other females, as well as males, but refused to comment on specific cases. 
 
 "We are looking into the possibility of additional men and women travelers," he said. 
 
 Somali leaders and sources close to police worry that the reports of female would-be jihadis from the region could mark a new trend. 
 
 The St. Paul woman is highly likely to have been recruited by IS through Islamist sympathizers in the United States, rather than joining the group on her own, they said. At least one other woman is suspected of helping her leave the United States. 
 
 Another U.S. teenager, nurse's aide Shannon Conley, 19, from Colorado, pleaded guilty this week to trying to travel to the Middle East to enroll in IS. She was arrested at Denver International Airport in April with a one-way ticket and had been recruited online by a male militant in Syria. 
 
 Nipping domestic extremism in the bud before Americans try to join terrorist groups is part of Obama's strategy against Islamic State announced in a televised address last week. 
 
 Along with an aerial bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria, Obama pledged that the government would "intervene with at-risk individuals before they become radicalized toward violence and decide to travel abroad to Syria and Iraq to join ISIL." 
 
 He said authorities would offer "tailored domestic programs to prevent violent extremism and radicalization" but gave no more details. 
 
 The Somali woman from St. Paul who traveled to Syria attended a mosque near the eastern bank of the Mississippi River which had previously attracted suspected extremists. In June, the mosque banned an Egyptian-American man it said was spreading radical ideology. 
 
 The woman told a relative after leaving the United States that she wanted to help children in IS-controlled territory in Syria. 
 
 "The nature of the recruitment of these crazy organizations is how they use the element of surprise. Now they have surprised us again by going for the girls," said Bihi, speaking about the St. Paul woman who he said was targeted by recruiters. 
 
 Bihi's teenaged nephew was killed in Somalia in 2009 after being persuaded to join al-Shabaab while in Minnesota. 
 
 "BABY FACTORIES" 
 
 While foreign women who join Islamic State often envision aiding a holy war or at least playing an active role in establishing a purist Islamic nation, the reality can be more mundane. 
 
 Monitoring of extremists' social media accounts and other writings shows that male jihadis regard women counterparts as little more than mating partners, said Mia Bloom, from the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. 
 
 "ISIS is recruiting these women in order to be baby factories. They are seeing the establishment of an Islamic state and now they need to populate the state," Bloom said. 
 
 Scores of European Muslim women, mostly from Britain and France, have joined IS in the Middle East. 
 
 Denver teenager Conley became engaged to an Islamic State militant in Syria who she met online. Jihadist groups like al Qaeda and IS usually only put women near the frontline in emergencies, Bloom said. 
 
 Some young foreign women have been deployed to Islamic State checkpoints in northern Syria where they pat down other women to search for weapons and force local females to abide by strict Islamic dress codes. 
 
 But snapshots on social media of the female jihadis' lives in Syria more often show that, "the girls go around making cookies. It's almost like a jihadi Tupperware party," Bloom said. 
 
 The main worry for law enforcement is that U.S. militants will one day return to the United States and attack targets. 
 
 "The obvious fear is of individuals coming back and committing a terrorist act here," said the FBI's Boosalis. The FBI has been working with the Somali community in Minnesota for years to help it combat radical Islamists. 
 
 (Editing by Marilyn Thompson and Ross Colvin) ||||| Graphic videos showing British and American hostages being murdered by Islamic State (Isis) fighters are stirring support among foreign jihadis who are excited by a new confrontation with the west, monitoring of Islamists' social media activity suggests. 
 
 Barbarous online films, such as the two-and-a half-minute video showing the killing of British aid worker David Haines released on Saturday night, are "turning on" jihadists in countries such as Tunisia and Libya who had previously reacted coolly to the civil war between the Sunni fundamentalists of Isis and the Shia minorities in Syria and Iraq. 
 
 Evidence from the Twitter, Facebook, Ask.fm and Instagram accounts of 450 foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq and others who follow them suggests the filmed murders and speeches attacking Washington and London appear to have made Isis's cause more glamorous to extremists abroad, according to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) at King's College London. 
 
 The response may explain why Isis fighters have released the videos and have threatened to kill another Briton, Alan Henning. Some analysts have asked why Isis leaders would invite stronger military intervention from the west, but postings on social networks used by jihadis suggest the tactic could be aimed at widening support for Isis. 
 
 "We have been monitoring the social media reaction and you can already see that the wannabe foreign fighters are excited by these killings," said Peter Neumann, director of the ICSR. "People in Tunisia and Libya are particularly interested in the prospect of fighting American and now British enemies. This is turning on people who were radicalised before this conflict started but weren't particularly excited by the Sunni-Shia battle. There are three types of reaction. There is pure jubilation, comments that America and now Britain are getting what they deserve, and the thought that this is not pretty, but that this is the kind of thing that happens with revolutions." 
 
 The man who beheaded Haines, a father of two born in Yorkshire and raised in Scotland, directly addressed David Cameron in the film, ridiculing him as "an obedient lapdog" of Washington. 
 
 "Your evil alliance with America, which continues to strike the Muslims of Iraq and most recently bombed the Haditha dam, will only accelerate your destruction," the masked man said. 
 
 There are already estimated to be more than 2,000 Isis fighters from Tunisia in Syria, but Neumann said the direct challenges to western leaders in the beheading videos were "an even stronger incentive for people who were sitting on the fence and thinking about going to fight". 
 
 Other analysts claimed the latest video was a sign of Isis's weakness after US air strikes. It drew a measured response from Cameron who promised "a calm, deliberate" process of driving back, dismantling and destroying Isis. But a former senior government adviser on terrorism said it should be met with immediate military strikes by British forces. 
 
 "I despair at the stupidity of these three beheadings," said Afzal Ashraf, a former senior Foreign Office official in Iraq, now a consultant fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. "There is no rationale to this. They are annoyed and upset they are being killed and so they are wheeling these poor guys out who they have held in some cases for two years and who they were hoping to get a ransom for. This tells me they are really hurting and the only thing they can do is kill an unarmed hostage in a very, very cowardly act, which shows just how weak they are." 
 
 He argued that paratroopers and special forces should be sent in to kill Isis fighters manning the remote checkpoints that guard the group's recently claimed territory. 
 
 "We have to send out a message that must be understood by not very smart people," he said. "I would get a few of our guys who would be only too happy to deliver David Cameron's compliments to those outposts. They could be there by supper, out by breakfast and be home in time for dinner." 
 
 But Julian Lewis MP, a member of parliament's intelligence and security committee, said such a response would be to grant Isis's wish for the west to launch "crusader-style attacks in Muslim lands". 
 
 "These disgraceful performances are acts of deliberate provocation," Lewis said. "The reason they are doing this is they are seeking to consolidate their position in the vanguard of political Islam … The very fact they are going to such lengths … shows they know the position they are trying to carve out is not secure." 
 
 Lewis called for an ideological counterattack in the form of a mass public information campaign aimed at rubbishing claims that the brutality of the Isis militants has any root in Islam. "We need a greater national effort to identify the doctrine and undermine it," he said. 
 
 That was echoed by Ghaffar Hussain, managing director of the counter-extremism thinktank the Quilliam Foundation, who called for a "multi-agency and cross-departmental approach to countering all forms of extremism and preventing radicalisation, whether violent or not, stemming from the acceptance that jihadist organisations recruit from a much larger pool of non-violent extremists".
– America may now be at war with ISIS, but a handful of Americans are joining up with the Islamic extremist group—and not all of them are men. US law enforcement is looking into a recent spate of women allegedly seeking to join the jihad, Reuters reports. In the past six weeks, three families in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area have reported missing female family members they suspect may be enlisting, one local Muslim community leader says. On Aug. 25, another 19-year-old from the area ran away from home, hopped a flight to Turkey, and joined ISIS in Syria. "The nature of the recruitment of these crazy organizations is how they use the element of surprise. Now they have surprised us again by going for the girls," the community leader says. The Twin Cities are a hotbed for such recruiting because they boast America's largest Somalian population, but the problem isn't entirely localized: In July, a 19-year-old Colorado woman was arrested for allegedly trying to join up. In other ISIS news: State Department officials tell the New York Times that several Arab countries have agreed to help with the US airstrike campaign against ISIS—though some will only be providing supplies rather than running strikes of their own. Iraqi officials say that France has agreed to carry out airstrikes of its own, and Australia has announced that it will be as well. Australia will also be sending 200 troops to Iraq to serve as military advisers. Meanwhile, ISIS has been enjoying a PR boon of sorts among extremists online thanks to its string of grisly beheading videos, the Guardian reports. "The wannabe foreign fighters are excited by these killings," the director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization explains. "People in Tunisia and Libya are particularly interested in the prospect of fighting American and now British enemies. This is turning on people who were radicalized before this conflict started but weren't particularly excited by the Sunni-Shia battle."