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WASHINGTON President Barack Obama acknowledged that U.S. intelligence agenciesunderestimatedthe threat from Islamic State militants in the Middle East and overestimated the ability and will of Iraq's army to fight such extremists.

Obama described the U.S. intelligence assessments in response to a question during a CBS "60 Minutes" interview that aired Sunday, in which he also conceded that the U.S. led military campaign against that group and an al-Qaida affiliate in Syria was helping Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, a man the U.N. has accused of war crimes.

But Obama said he had no choice but to order U.S. air strikes on Assad's enemies, the Islamic State and the Khorasan Group because, he said, "those folks could kill Americans."

The Islamic State group, which derived from but has broken with al-Qaida, has taken control of large sections of Iraq and Syria. The Khorasan Group is a cell of militants that the U.S. says is plotting attacks against the West in cooperation with the Nusra front, Syria's al-Qaida affiliate.

Obama was asked how Islamic State fighters had come to control so much territory in Syria and Iraq and whether it was a surprise to him. The president said that during the Iraq war, U.S. military forces with the help of Iraq's Sunni tribes were able to quash al-Qaida fighters, who went "back underground."

"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 an excerpt release before the show aired.

He noted that his director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has acknowledged that the U.S. "underestimatedwhat had been taking place in Syria." Obama also said it was "absolutely true" that the U.S. overestimated the ability and will of the Iraqi army.

Both the Islamic State group and the Khorasan Group have been targeted by U.S. airstrikes in recent days; together they constitute the most significant military opposition to Assad, whose government the U.S. would like to see gone.

On the fact that the U.S.-led military campaign had worked to Assad's benefit, Obama said, "I recognize the contradiction," but added: "We are not going to stabilize Syria under the rule of Assad," whose government has committed "terrible atrocities."

Republican Sen. John McCain, who lost the presidential election to Obama in 2008 and has been a frequent critic on foreign policy, said Monday that the administration had miscalculated the necessity for the United States to keep a residual force of troops in Iraq after the war there ended.

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Islamic State threat 'underestimated' by US: Obama