August 12, 2014

Failure in Syria has led to strengthen IS, which is now a threat to the Middle East

editor:	Murat Suner

The former secretary of state, and probable candidate for president, Hillary Clinton calls it a failure not having helped Syrian rebels to fight Assad's regime.

Jeffrey Goldberg refers in his article in The Atlantic to an interview he conducted with Hillary Clinton. There, she clearly points out the consequences of leaving the rebellion without help:

“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.”

Most advantage of this situation has been taken by the terror regime of IS, which has spread its gruesome control over significant parts of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and now attacking the Kurdish governed autonomous region of Northern Iraq. Thomas von Osten-Sacken, director of WADI, an Iraqi-German non-governmental organization, says to VICE News:

“The Islamic State can only be stopped with violence and the Kurds won’t manage to do that by themselves. This conflict is not confined to Iraq, it involves the entire region. Islamic State fighters are also in Lebanon, Jordan is threatened, the only reason Islamic State is this strong is because of the political failure in Syria. In order to beat Islamic State and find a long-term political solution one must focus on the entire region.”

Markus Kaim, director of the Berlin foundation Wissenschaft und Politik, said to German radio station NDR: “We see now that it was a huge mistake to not support the Syrian opposition, that was fighting ISIS in Syria at the time.”

As former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recently said: The world is a mess. And it seems that Kurdish Peshmerga, Syrian rebells, the Iraqi armed forces and U.S. air strikes won't do the job.