US intelligence agencies underestimated Islamic State activity inside Syria, which has become “ground zero” for jihadists worldwide, President Barack Obama said in a CBS television interview broadcast yesterday.

Conversely, the US overestimated the ability of the Iraqi army to fight the militant groups, Obama said in a 60 Minutes interview taped on Friday, days after the US President made his case at the United Nations for action.

Citing earlier comments by James Clapper, director of national intelligence, Obama acknowledged that US intelligence underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.

Islamic militants went underground when US Marines quashed al-Qaeda in Iraq with help from Iraq’s tribes, he said.

“But over the past couple of years, during the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swaths of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos,” Obama said according to a clip of the interview broadcast earlier.

“And so this became ground zero for jihadists around the world.”

Obama last week expanded US-led air strikes, which began in Iraq in August, to Syria and he has been seeking to build a wider coalition effort to weaken Islamic State. This group has killed thousands and beheaded at least three westerners while seizing parts of Syria and Iraq. Clapper told a Washington Post columnist that US intelligence had underestimated Islamic State and overestimated Iraq’s army.

“I didn’t see the collapse of the Iraqi security force in the north coming,” Clapper was quoted as saying. “I didn’t see that. It boils down to predicting the will to fight, which is an imponderable.”

Obama outlined the military goal against Islamic State: “We just have to push them back, and shrink their space, and go after their command and control, and their capacity, and their weapons, and their fueling, and cut off their financing, and work to eliminate the flow of foreign fighters.”