Obama to reveal game plan on ISIS

US President Barack Obama says he will make a speech to lay out his "game plan" to deal with and ultimately defeat the Islamic State militants, but warned he was not going to wage another ground war in Iraq.

An Iraqi militia fighter from Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Saraya al-Salam (Peace Brigade), waves a flag next to a rocket launcher during heavy clashes with Islamic State (IS) fighters in Tuz Khurmatu in Salaheddin province south of Kirkuk. (JM LOPEZ/Getty Images)

"I'm preparing the country to make sure that we deal with a threat from ISIL," Obama said in an interview aired on Sunday on NBC, using an alternative name for the jihadist group.

"On Wednesday, I'll make a speech and describe what our game plan's going to be going forward," Obama said in the interview, in which he gave his most explicit rundown yet of his strategy for taking on IS.

Two days after returning from the NATO summit in Wales, Obama said he was confident he would be ableto build a broad-based international coalition to take on Islamic State, which has carved out a stronghold in large areas of Syria and Iraq.

"But this is not going to be an announcement about US ground troops.

"This is not the equivalent of the Iraq war. What this is is similar to the kinds of counterterrorism campaigns that we've been engaging in consistently over the last five, six, seven years."

Obama said he would be asking Americans to understand the serious threat.

"Over the course of months, we are going to be able to not just blunt the momentum of ISIL," he said.

"We are going to systematically degrade their capabilities. We're going to shrink the territory that they control. And ultimately we're going to defeat them."