Update to this story.

Via The Hill:

The U.S. intelligence community Monday pushed back at reports that the White House was not warned about the growing strength of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) ahead of the group’s recent offensive.

“The job of the Intelligence Community is to warn. We did that,” said a U.S. intelligence official. “In short, this was not U.S. intelligence failure. It was an Iraqi military failure.”

Reports suggested that the White House was caught off-guard last week by the Islamic State’s rapid advance on Erbil, a city in northern Iraq where the U.S. has a consulate and joint operations center

After Kurdish Peshmerga forces found themselves outgunned, President Obama ordered U.S. airstrikes there and humanitarian drops to stranded Iraqi refugees.

Obama said on Saturday that ISIS’s “movement over the last several months has been more rapid than the intelligence estimates.”

U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal in a report published Monday that American intelligence agencies “often have underestimated the group’s ability to make rapid operational gains.”

An intelligence official, though, pushed back against that characterization, saying that analysts have been closely tracking ISIS and its predecessor, al Qaeda in Iraq, for years.