Barack Obama will meet the leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Italy on Monday to discuss the next phase of the war against the Islamic State.
The US president will hold talks with David Cameron, François Hollande, Angela Merkel and Matteo Renzi in the German city of Hanover, the White House announced.
“The president looks forward to discussing with these European partners our joint counter-terrorism efforts and the need to more effectively share information between our countries and within Europe,” the statement said.
The presidents and prime ministers will discuss the fight against Isis, migration, Syria, Ukraine and Libya, as well as additional steps Nato must take to “address challenges on Europe’s eastern and southern periphery”, it added.
Obama arrives in Hanover on Sunday to attend the city’s industrial technology fair on the third and final leg of what feels like a farewell trip that is also taking in allies Saudi Arabia and the UK. He will be keen to emphasise the US’s commitment to Europe, which some feel has been neglected due to wars in the Middle East and his self-declared “pivot to Asia”.
Merkel was quoted by AFP saying the leaders would address “important issues on the international agenda including Syria, certainly the issue of Russia-Ukraine and perhaps also Libya and migration”.
She said the same group had gathered on the sidelines of a G20 summit in Turkey in November and the format allowed the leaders “to simply exchange views on political circumstances and make sure we are on the same page in terms of information and options for taking action”.
At the meeting, Obama is likely to point to recent successes against Isis including territorial gains and the killing of high-profile figures such as British citizen Mohammed Emwazi, known as “Jihadi John”.
In an interview earlier this week he predicted that Mosul, the main Isis stronghold in Iraq, could be liberated sooner than many expected.
“As we see the Iraqis willing to fight and gaining ground, we must make sure that we are providing them more support,” the president told Charlie Rose on CBS. “We’re not doing the fighting ourselves, but when we provide training, when we provide special forces who are backing them up, when we are gaining intelligence, working with the coalitions that we have, what we’ve seen is that we can continually tighten the noose.
“My expectation is that by the end of the year, we will have created the conditions whereby Mosul will eventually fall.”
The talk will also be an opportunity for European leaders to stress the scale of the migration crisis – the biggest since the second world war – which some have complained it is hard for Washington to fully grasp.
Obama, meanwhile, is seeking to smooth diplomatic feathers during the tour. In a recent interview with Atlantic magazine, he suggested that Cameron stopped paying attention to Libya after the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi because he was “distracted by a range of other things”. The White House moved quickly to reaffirm how highly it values the “special relationship”.
The meeting will take place at Hanover’s Herrenhausen Castle, famous for its baroque gardens. Merkel said last month that she hoped to pursue negotiations with the US over the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which were started in 2013.
