By Sam Kiley, Foreign Affairs Editor
America is putting the defence of the Iraqi government and the destruction of Islamic State's command structures ahead of defending the embattled Kurdish city of Kobani, a leading member of the Obama administration has admitted.
Tony Blinkin, US Deputy National Security Advisor, said on a visit to London that the focus of the American-led coalition was "in the first instance in Iraq".
He said that Turkey's repeated calls for a humanitarian safe area inside Syria and a no-fly zone in its air space were being considered and the subject of talks with Washington's envoys in Turkey.
"The objective is Isil (IS)," he said. "It is a threat to a country, Iraq, with which we have a partnership.
"It's also a threat to many people in Syria, in a country where we don't have a government we can work with.
"In order to get at Isil and deal with the threat it poses to our people in the region, our interests in the region, and - if left unchecked - to us here in the UK and to the US, we have evolved what I believe is a very comprehensive strategy.
"And it has multiple lines of effort. It has a military line of effort, which is designed to set Isil back on the ground in the first instance in Iraq … and that's critically important.
"What has been a big part of Isis success is the perception it has created - that it had momentum, that it was 10ft tall and that it was on the march, and on the move and that was attracting foreign fighters in record numbers.
"It's important in the first instance to start to blunt that momentum - start to take it down a few pegs and start to move it from its toes to its heels. And in Iraq that's exactly what we are doing.
"In Syria the principle initial challenge with regard to Isil is to go after the HQ and the command and control ... to go at its ability to supply itself or to resource itself to sustain itself and then to project that into Iraq."
Mr Blinkin is the first western official to admit what has been suspected by Syria's rebels, who have been fighting both the Damascus regime and Islamic State - that they are a lower priority for Washington.
A no-fly zone would deny Damascus the freedom of the skies to bomb rebels and civilian areas.
But this has been resisted by the Western allies while they work out which moderate opposition groups they will arm and train over coming months to provide the boots on the ground that the allies have refused to deploy to the region.
Senior military sources have repeatedly told Sky News that it will take at least a year to train moderate rebels - and that who to train and where to train them has yet to be decided.
Among the groups seen by experts as most reliable are the Kurdish peshmerga forces in Iraq and the YPG, Kurdish militia in northern Syria currently battling to save Kobani.
The US coalition has stepped up air strikes against the Islamist militants around Kobane - but Mr Blinkin warned that the priority would continue to be to attack IS's infrastructure which reinforced its campaigning in Iraq.
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