BRISBANE, Australia: U.S. President Barack Obama Sunday rejected any alliance with Bashar Assad against the extremist group ISIS, arguing that the Syrian ruler was illegitimate and that any such pact would backfire.

 

The announcement came as ISIS released a video in which it claimed it had beheaded its latest foreign hostage, American Abdul-Rahman Kassig, along with 14 other men it said were pilots and soldiers in Assad’s army.

 

“Assad has ruthlessly murdered hundreds of thousands of his citizens. As a consequence, he has completely lost legitimacy with the majority of the country,” Obama told reporters after a G-20 summit in Brisbane.

 

“For us to then make common cause with him against [ISIS] would only turn more Sunnis in Syria in the direction of supporting [ISIS] and would weaken our coalition” against the Al-Qaeda splinter group, he said.

 

U.S. reports this week said the president had ordered a wholesale review of his administration’s Syria policy, with Assad still in power despite an armed uprising that is now in its fourth year.

 

The conflict has become many-sided as jihadis gain ground, notably ISIS and the Nusra Front, which is affiliated to Al-Qaeda.

 

Obama has built an international coalition against ISIS as it rampages across both Syria and Iraq.

 

The coalition in September launched its first airstrikes against the militants, using Syrian air space, and Obama is deploying up to 1,500 more U.S. troops to Iraq.

 

The president denied that he intended to recalibrate his Syria policy, insisting that it was reviewed all the time to see what was working and what was not.

 

“Certainly no changes have taken place with respect to our attitude toward Assad,” he said.

 

“This is a fight against extremists of any stripe that are willing to behead innocent people or mow down political prisoners with a cruelty that we’ve very rarely seen in the modern age,” he added.

 

Obama said that communication with the Assad regime was limited to informing them that if the U.S. uses Syrian air space in anti-ISIS operations “they would be well advised not to take us on.”

 

“But beyond that, there’s no expectation that we are going to in some ways enter an alliance with Assad,” the president said. “He is not credible in that country.”

 

But when asked if the White House was engaged in discussing ways to remove Assad from power, Obama curtly responded, “No.”

 

Syrian opposition politicians and many rebel groups have expressed their anger with the U.S. strategy of targeting ISIS and several other jihadi groups, while leaving Syrian regime forces untouched.

 

They blame the regime for enabling the steady growth of ISIS inside the country, and argue that toppling Assad should accompany the anti-ISIS coalition’s efforts.

 

Separately, Turkey and the United States have agreed a plan under which some 2,000 fighters from the mainstream Syrian armed opposition would be trained on Turkish soil, a report said Saturday.

 

The fighters from the Free Syrian Army will be trained at the Kirsehir base some 150 kms south of the capital Ankara by both Turkish and U.S. personnel starting from late December, Hurriet Daily News reported, quoting unidentified officials. Washington will provide weapons for the fighters and is also expected to pay for the training, the English-language daily said.

 

The agreement was reached after a third round of talks between Turkish and U.S. military officials in Ankara, the daily said.

 

The officials did not, however, reach an agreement on the training of Syrian Kurd fighters from the Democratic Union Party (PYD), who are leading the battle against ISIS jihadis for the key border town of Ain al-Arab, the paper said. The United States is due to train these fighters in Iraq’s Kurdish region, it added.

 

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has insisted that the PYD fighters are part of a “terror group” allied to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) who have fought Turkish security forces in a three-decade insurgency for Kurdish self-rule.

 

Meanwhile, the British government said over the weekend that it was investigating reports that “Jihadi John,” the British-accented ISIS militant apparently responsible for the beheading of Western hostages, had been injured in a U.S. airstrike in an Iraqi town close to the Syrian border last week.

 

The Mail reported that it was the same attack that injured elusive ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, sparking initial rumors that he had been killed.

 

“Jihadi John,” named after Beatle John Lennon due to his British background, is believed to be responsible for the murders of U.S. journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and British aid workers David Haines and Allan Henning.

 

The Mail claimed that a nurse who treated some of those wounded in the attack said there was a man named Jalman on her list, referring to him as “the one who slaughtered the journalists.”

 

The wounded men were then driven to ISIS’ Syrian stronghold of Raqqa, according to the Mail’s source.