Hollande shakes hands with Merkel after a press conference at the Elysee presidential palace in Paris yesterday.

AFP
Paris


French President Francois Hollande yesterday urged Germany to do more in the fight against Islamic State militants after he held talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel following the Paris attacks.
Hollande met his closest EU partner during a week of intense but so far faltering efforts by France to build a coalition to crush IS in its fiefdom in Iraq and Syria.
Hollande said he hoped Germany “can do even more in the fight against Daesh in Syria and Iraq”, using another term for IS, which claimed responsibility for the carnage in the French capital.
Merkel said in response she would act “swiftly” to see how Germany could take up “additional responsibilities” to assist in the fight against terror.
“We will be stronger than the terror,” she said.
In one step in that effort, Germany said yesterday it would send 650 soldiers to Mali to provide some relief to French forces battling militants in the west African nation.
Earlier, Merkel and Hollande each laid a pink rose on the growing pile of tributes in Place de la Republique, the Paris square that has become a rallying point after the shootings and bombings that killed 130 people on November 13.
Having received few firm commitments from President Barack Obama in Washington on Tuesday, Hollande will take his plea for a counter-IS alliance to President Vladimir Putin in Moscow today.
Hollande and Merkel said they hoped tensions would calm between Russia and Turkey—two potential components of the anti-IS alliance—which fell out over the downing of a Russian warplane at the Turkish-Syrian border.
The French parliament meanwhile gave overwhelming support for French air strikes on IS targets in Iraq and Syria to continue.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls told lawmakers: “There is no alternative, we must annihilate Daesh.”
He said French planes, which started hitting IS targets in Iraq in September 2014, had carried out more than 300 strikes against the militants.
French jets are taking off from its Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier in the eastern Mediterranean to bomb the militants.
Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said all 27 of France’s EU partners would help France’s efforts to strike at IS in some way.
British leader David Cameron will today set out the case for his country to join air strikes, but he requires parliamentary approval.
Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov threw his weight behind the French president’s proposal to close off the Syria-Turkey border to prevent the flow of militants crossing the frontier. The border is considered the main crossing point for foreign fighters seeking to join IS.  
“I think this is a good proposal and tomorrow President Hollande will talk to us in greater detail about it. We would be ready to seriously consider the necessary measures for this,” Lavrov said in Moscow.
While Hollande is trying to persuade the US and Russia to work more closely together to strike at the militants, Obama was cool on the idea on Tuesday.
The US president said the problem Washington faced was “Russia’s focus on propping up (Syrian President) Assad rather than focusing on ISIL”, using another acronym for IS.