Category Archives: Syria

What does the Iran deal mean for Syria?

Aron Lund writes: In the conspiratorial world of Syrian politics, speculation is rife about secret “Syria clauses” in the deal. The opposition fears an under-the-table deal benefiting Iran and Assad, while government supporters are afraid that Iran will now move to improve its relations with the West by sacrificing Assad. Neither seems very likely and negotiators are probably correct when they claim that the Vienna process focused exclusively on the nuclear issue. But it is no secret that there are those on both sides who would like to see a more comprehensive rapprochement, or at least improved coordination in the struggle against the extremists of the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

With the nuclear deal now signed and perhaps secure, there is suddenly room for new talks to begin. Or if they are already secretly under way, such parallel diplomatic tracks can be accelerated without fear of upsetting the nuclear talks. Whatever happens, Iraq and Syria will be top concerns for all involved, although the former may make for more fruitful discussions than the latter.

In pushing so hard for the nuclear deal, Barack Obama has seemingly wagered that some combination of trade and talks will be more successful at incentivizing U.S.-friendly Iranian politics than the isolation and military threats of the past decades. Whether he is right or wrong, it is not an unreasonable assumption. For Assad, too, today’s celebration must therefore be tinged with quiet concern over how an improvement in Iranian-Western relations might affect Tehran’s political priorities in coming years. A historic achievement this may well have been, but history has a way of unfolding at its own pace and in its own ways. [Continue reading…]

Rasha Elass writes: President Bashar al Assad appears heartened by the Iran nuclear deal, presuming that Tehran will continue to be his main backer. Many analysts say Assad would not have survived this long without Iran’s support, and would quickly falter without it.

Assad may be right, but not entirely.

While it is true that Iran will not abandon its hegemony over Syria, a hegemony that has grown to unprecedented levels in government-controlled areas from Damascus to Syria’s coastline, there is a flip side to this equation.

Bolstering Assad has become expensive for Iran, which has injected billions of dollars into Damascus, and has sent military and security personnel to aid Assad’s military operations in Syria. While it is difficult to know exact numbers, Iran has been public about the hundreds of casualties it is enduring in Syria so far, a cost that many Iranians may find pointless.

With Iran coming in from the cold, there might be political capital to be harvested if Tehran emerged as a real broker to a resolution in Syria.

One way of doing this is to keep the Assad regime somewhat in tact, but without Assad himself. For months, some Syrian opposition members have been floating this idea as well, preferring it as a way of moving forward while avoiding a post-Saddam scenario, when the US dismantled the military and the entire government in Baghdad. It is a workable solution if Syrian opposition is well represented in the new, transitional government. Iran may also prefer this solution because it puts an end to a seemingly endless war, yet it maintains Tehran’s leverage over Damascus.

Already Turkey is calling on Iran to step up to this challenge. [Continue reading…]

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Documenting death inside Syria’s secret prisons

NPR reports: A Syrian forensic photographer, who now uses the pseudonym Caesar, documented the death of thousands of detainees in Syria’s brutal prison system. He made more than 55,000 high-resolution images before he fled the country, fearing for his safety, in 2013.

He spoke publicly for the first time in July 2014, when he appeared before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, wearing a blue jacket with a hood to protect his identity.

Dozens of Caesar’s photographs will be displayed again in the halls of Congress on Wednesday.

The exhibition is sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in cooperation with the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee. [Continue reading…]

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Assad: Iran to redouble support following nuclear deal

NOW reports: Syria’s president has hailed the historic nuclear deal inked between Iran and the P5+1 powers, saying that Damascus is “quite assured” that Tehran will further its support for support his regime.

Bashar al-Assad early Tuesday afternoon sent separate cables to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani congratulating Tehran over the deal, calling it a “historic achievement.”

“We are quite assured that the Islamic Republic of Iran will continue, with greater momentum, supporting the just issues of peoples and working for peace and stability to prevail in the region and the world,” Syria’s state SANA news agency quoted Assad as saying in a communiqué to Khamenei hours after the landmark deal was inked in Vienna.

In a separate cable to his Iranian counterpart, Assad called the nuclear agreement a “fundamental turning point in the history of Iran’s relations with the countries of the region and the world,” according to SANA.

The Syrian president’s comments serve as a reference to Iran’s support for its allies, including Damascus, which has reportedly already markedly increased in recent months, most recently last week when Iran granted Syria a $1 billion credit line. [Continue reading…]

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The cold-blooded leaders of ISIS

Christoph Reuter, an investigative journalist for Der Spiegel has been to Syria 19 times and recently published The Black Power: The “Islamic State” and the Strategists of Terror (only available in German), which details the strategy of ISIS, or Daesh, as Reuter prefers to call the organization. He spoke to NOW managing editor Hanin Ghaddar.

Reuter: So the overall idea of the book is about this surface of Daesh which we perceive, but when you see how they operate, when you see who is the inner core of leadership, and when you see what relations the old leadership of the Islamic State and Iraq had with Ali Mamluk and Assef Shawkat in Syria — extremely close relations — you see that Daesh becomes kind of three-dimensional. You see that it’s not just a jihadist outlet; it’s a combination of a very cold-blooded, engineered plan — the old Baathists, the old secret service guys, with real jihadists, with believers. But you have a clear hierarchy of who’s making the plans and decisions.

NOW: Who exactly is making the plans and decisions?

Reuter: The Baathists — the old professionals. They also flip alliances. They had some kind of tactical alliance with the rebels, and I mean on the level that they could always claim ‘we are against Assad.’ But they also have this tactical cooperation with Assad’s regime. It’s not true what the opposition always say that Daesh was created by Assad. We collected 15 cases from early 2014, and new ones from June 2015, where rebels and Daesh would fight. They had clashes in Maara, in Al-Bab, in Aleppo and in Raqqa, and then you would have the regime air force, either during the fighting or immediately after bombing only the rebels, never the Daesh side. Also, when Daesh was removed from Al-Bab by the rebels, the regime pounded Al-Bab 12 hours later and made it easier for Daesh to come back.

Daesh basically borrowed the regime’s air force, and this was the clearest evidence that they are potentially helping each other.

NOW: Do you think there is also communication or only tactical cooperation?

Reuter: Well, there must be communication, but we have no evidence of the communication.

So, you have these two very cynical archenemies, who both believe — rightly — that they can be, for the time being, useful to each other in certain areas. So you have the confirmation that this is not a jihadist outlet of believers. They have no problem to have deals with the KRG, with Barazani’s government, like: ‘we take Mosul and we don’t touch Kirkuk.’ So you had no clashes or conflict from June to August 2014, then suddenly they felt powerful enough and they took a lot of the Kurdish areas.

There’s a very non-religious, tactical and practical element of how they operate. It’s completely different from real believers. They could make deals with the devil if need be. [Continue reading…]

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‘We’re living the Thug Life’: refugees stuck on Greek border have nothing left to lose

The Guardian reports: In a dusty field that straddles the Greek-Macedonian border, quite where one country ends and the other begins is not entirely clear.

But several Macedonian soldiers in the area are very certain. “Get back,” one shouts through the darkness, herding hundreds of refugees a couple of metres further south from where they stood a moment ago. “Get back to the Greek border.”

The crowds shuffle briefly backwards, and the soldiers seem satisfied. “Please,” a Syrian mother calls back, a toddler in her arms. “We are a family. Where should we go now?”

It is a filthy spot, filled with the detritus of past travellers. Surrounded by farmland, the only lighting comes from a nearby train track, and the only bedding is the sand the woman stands on.

“You must sleep here,” the Macedonian replies.

It is an alarming order – not just for these refugees, who have walked 40 miles to reach this point, but for the people of the country they have just crossed. Greece has received nearly 80,000 refugees this year, a record figure that has seen it overtake Italy as the primary migrant gateway to Europe. Migrants are arriving in such high numbers by dinghy from Turkey that the authorities – already battling an economic crisis – cannot feed, house, or process their paperwork fast enough, leading to bottlenecks on the Greek islands.

One factor helping relieve the pressure was the constant stream of refugees out the other side of Greece, near the northern border town of Idomeni, into Macedonia. But in the past fortnight, the Macedonian government has begun to regulate the flow. Until a few days ago the route had been blocked for a whole week – raising the spectre of a refugee bottleneck at both ends of Greece, at a time when the country is struggling to support its own citizens, let alone a record wave of refugees. [Continue reading…]

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Syria is caught between bombs and butchery

Hassan Hassan writes: Consider two heart-wrenching scenes that recently emerged from Syria. The first one is of children lining up behind 25 soldiers in the historic city of Palmyra, pointing pistols at the soldiers’ heads. The second is of a child killed in his Aleppo home by a barrel bomb that failed to explode.

In the first scene, shown in a video released by ISIL recently, the 25 soldiers are on the stage of a Roman amphitheatre and the child executioners parade before they line up behind them. A photo shows the bloodstained, lifeless child in Aleppo in the second clip – he appears to be hugging the unexploded barrel bomb.

It is hard to say which crime is worse. The culprits responsible for the two crimes are among Syria’s worst villains. ISIL is training a generation of Syrian children to be monsters, while Bashar Al Assad’s tactics are damning thousands of children to early graves.

Thousands of Syrian children have lost nearly every aspect of their childhood in this dreadful conflict. Thousands more have lost their lives. One only needs to visit Syrian communities in Turkey or open YouTube to see children who have lost limbs because of arbitrary shelling and bombing.

In ISIL-held territories, the lack of options force many children to join the group. Boredom is made worse by the fact that even if some of them decide to look for opportunities elsewhere, they find all avenues closed.

As a Syrian, I feel guilty about warning a child or teenager against a smuggler’s promise to take him to Europe. I know where their thoughts might head if that desperate option ceases to be a possibility. I then wonder how long sane people can resist as the situation deteriorates. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS comes to Russia

The Daily Beast reports: At the same time that bombs rain down on the Islamic State, and it grapples with tactical setbacks in Syria and solidifying its hold in Iraq, ISIS continues to expand its brand, this time in the Caucasus. In June, one of the most important and respected rebels in the North Caucasus pledged loyalty to ISIS.

The defection of Amir Khamzat, commander of the Chechen Vilaiyat, [territorial-administrative units that roughly correspond with the regional republics], represents a large gain to the standing of ISIS and its expansion into Russia. A statement posted [to Twitter] on June 21 read: “We testify that all Mujahideen of the Caucasus — in the Velayats of Nokhchiycho [Chechnya], Dagestan, Galgaicho [Ingushetia] and KBK [Kabarda, Balkaria and Karachay] — are united in their decision and we do not have differences among ourselves.” This statement led ISIS on June 23 to embrace the pledges of loyalty and declared the creation of a new Vilaiyat under the control of Dagestani Amir Rustam Asilderov, also known as Abu Muhammad al-Kadarskii.

Estimates of the size of the insurgency are hard to come by, as Russian official statistics are notoriously unreliable, and the autonomous nature of the insurgency means local cells’ size can fluctuate with the seasons and a revolving door of committed recruits. Despite this, an estimated 249 militants were killed in 2014 alone, and some 5,816 civilians, security officials, and militants have been killed since 2010, according to the site Caucasus Knot, which tracks the conflict in the region. Additionally, Russian officials estimate some 2,200 Russians have gone to fight in Iraq and Syria, mostly from the North Caucasus. With the presence of ISIS established, those same recruits are more likely to stay local and fight in the Caucasus. [Continue reading…]

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The deadly consequences of mislabeling Syria’s revolutionaries

Labib Al Nahhas, head of foreign political relations for Ahrar al-Sham, writes: As has become obvious, the Obama administration’s response to the Syrian conflict is an abject failure. No clear strategy has been determined; the administration’s “red lines” have not been honored. Short-term, stopgap measures informed by the Iraq and Afghanistan experiences, along with the noise generated by a media fixated on the Islamic State, have taken priority over achievable, long-term goals. The result: a death toll commonly estimated at between 200,000 and 300,000 people (though it’s certainly higher), more than 11 million displaced and numerous cities in ruins.

Nowhere is this failure clearer than in the consequence of the misguided way that Syrian revolutionaries are labeled as either “moderate” or “extremist.”

In December, Secretary of State John F. Kerry stated that “Syrians should not have to choose between a tyrant and the terrorists.” There was, Kerry declared, a third option: “the moderate Syrian opposition who are fighting both extremists and [Syrian President Bashar al-]Assad every day.” Unfortunately, this commendable view has broken down because the United States has defined the term “moderate” in such a narrow and arbitrary fashion that it excludes the bulk of the mainstream opposition. [Continue reading…]

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After backing regime, Syrian minorities face peril

The Wall Street Journal reports: Ever since the Syrian revolution began in 2011, President Bashar al-Assad tried to cast it as a religious conflict with radical Sunni Islam in which he would wear the mantle of protector of the country’s numerous minorities.

The plan has worked to a great degree, with Mr. Assad’s own Alawite community as well as Shiites, Christians, Druse and, initially, even the Kurds, backing him against a predominantly Sunni rebellion that has become progressively more bloody and sectarian.

But now, as the regime is reeling under attack by the murderous Islamic State militants in the east and a rebel coalition that includes the al Qaeda affiliate Nusra Front in the north, these minorities face the growing danger of being wiped out alongside Mr. Assad.

“As bad as things have been in Syria, they could get a whole lot worse,” warned Ryan Crocker, former U.S. ambassador to Damascus and dean of the Bush School of Government at Texas A&M University. [Continue reading…]

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More than 4 million refugees have fled from Syria

The New York Times reports: The number of Syrians who have fled into neighboring countries to escape the civil war has reached more than four million, the United Nations said Thursday, and with the fighting dragging into its fifth year the number is still rising.

More than 24,000 people crossed into Turkey to escape fighting in northern Syria in June, pushing the number now sheltering in neighboring countries past four million, increasing the Syrian refugee population by one million in just 10 months, the United Nations refugee agency reported.

International aid agencies say the fighting has driven at least 7.6 million people who remain in the country from their homes.

“This is the biggest refugee population from a single conflict in a generation,” Antonio Guterres, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, said in a statement. Mr. Guterres, once again, warned that international aid was not keeping pace with the scale of the crisis, and that many refugees were “sinking deeper into poverty.”

“Worsening conditions are driving growing numbers toward Europe and further afield,” Mr. Guterres said, “but the overwhelming majority remain in the region.”

The latest influx into Turkey raised the number of Syrian refugees there to 1.8 million, giving it the biggest refugee population in the world, the United Nations reported. As many as 1.2 million Syrians are now sheltering in Lebanon, more than 629,000 are in Jordan and close to quarter of a million have fled to Iraq.

The United Nations has appealed for $5.5 billion in aid in 2015 to deal with the humanitarian fallout of the Syria crisis. But by the end of June it had received less than a quarter of that amount, the refugee agency said. [Continue reading…]

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A secret to ISIS success: Shock troops who fight to the death

The Associated Press reports: Bearded and wearing bright blue bandanas, the Islamic State group’s “special forces” unit gathered around their commander just before they attacked the central Syrian town of al-Sukhna. “Victory or martyrdom,” they screamed, pledging their allegiance to God and vowing never to retreat.

The IS calls them “Inghemasiyoun,” Arabic for “those who immerse themselves.” The elite shock troops are possibly the deadliest weapon in the extremist group’s arsenal: Fanatical and disciplined, they infiltrate their targets, unleash mayhem and fight to the death, wearing explosives belts to blow themselves up among their opponents if they face defeat. They are credited with many of the group’s stunning battlefield successes — including the capture of al-Sukhna in May after the scene shown in an online video released by the group.

“They cause chaos and then their main ground offensive begins,” said Redur Khalil, spokesman of the U.S.-backed Kurdish People’s Protection Units, which have taken the lead in a string of military successes against the IS in Syria. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. only training 60 Syrian fighters, about 1 percent of goal

Reuters reports: The United States said on Tuesday it was falling far behind plans to build a Syrian opposition force to battle Islamic State, disclosing that just 60 fighters were in training after U.S. vetting thinned the number of recruits.

The U.S. military launched its program in May to train up to 5,400 fighters a year in what was seen as a test of President Barack Obama’s strategy of getting local partners to combat extremists and keep U.S. troops off the front lines.

The training program has been challenged from the start, with many candidates being declared ineligible and some even dropping out. Obama’s requirement that they target militants from Islamic State has sidelined huge segments of the Syrian opposition focused instead on battling Syrian government forces. [Continue reading…]

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In Syria, the weakness of ISIS and U.S. strategy on display

The Washington Post reports: The unexpected rout of Islamic State forces across a wide arc of territory in their northeastern Syria heartland has exposed vulnerabilities in the ranks of the militants — and also the limits of the U.S.-led strategy devised to confront them.

Islamic State fighters have been driven out of a third of their flagship province of Raqqa in recent weeks by a Kurdish-led force that has emerged as one of the most effective American partners in the war. The offensive, backed by U.S. airstrikes, has deprived the militants of control of their most important border crossing with Turkey and forced them onto the defensive in their self-proclaimed capital of Raqqa city, something that would have been unthinkable as recently as a month ago.

The advance has shifted the focus of the fight from Iraq to Syria for the first time in months. A blitz of 18 coalition airstrikes against Raqqa over the weekend took out bridges and roads used by the Islamic State to move supplies to battlefronts elsewhere. The air attack was one of the most intense in Syria, according to a Pentagon statement and activists in Raqqa.

On Monday, President Obama cited the recent gains in Syria as evidence of progress. “When we have an effective partner on the ground, ISIL can be pushed back,” he said in Washington after the Pentagon briefed him on the status of the war.

“ISIL’s strategic weaknesses are real,” he added, using an acronym for the Islamic State.

But the absence of reliable local forces to press the fight deeper into the Islamic State’s home turf has revealed the weakness of the U.S. strategy, analysts say. And rising tensions between Arabs in the area and their purported Kurdish liberators risk jeopardizing the gains.

The offensive is taking Kurdish forces far beyond traditionally Kurdish territory and into areas where Syrian Arabs are in the majority, drawing allegations from Syrians and also the Turkish government that the Kurds are taking advantage of the U.S.-led air war to carve out a Kurdish state.

The Syrian opposition has accused the Kurds of driving Arabs from their villages to consolidate their control. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS’s strategy: Lasting and expanding

Lina Khatib writes: The rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (also known as ISIS and ISIL, for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) has signaled the start of a new jihadist era. The Islamic State has declared a long-term goal, which is to establish an Islamic state, or a caliphate, based on an extremist interpretation of sharia, making it more than just a terrorist organization despite its origins as an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The Islamic State is a hybrid jihadist group. It has appropriated the radical Islamist ideology of al-Qaeda while implementing the centralized command model of the paramilitary Hezbollah and some tactics from the Taliban’s local governance structures.

Its strategy for survival and growth has relied on a number of components: pragmatism regarding the Syrian regime; the control and development of territories as a method of commanding local populations and attracting foreign fighters; the use of ideology and the media as tools to control populations, recruit fighters, and raise funds; and a centralized military strategy.

Since its expansion into Syria in 2013, the Sunni extremist group has been engaged in an existential battle with al-Qaeda. And, with all of its strategic tools, the Islamic State has presented itself as the “true” al-Qaeda, asserting that it is making al-Qaeda’s ideological goal of an Islamic state a concrete reality, which provides a cloak of authenticity that has appealed to donors and recruits.

But although ideology plays an important role in how the Islamic State operates, the organization’s strategic objectives are not driven by ideology but instead revolve around the acquisition of money, resources, and power. Establishing a caliphate in Iraq and Syria is therefore the beginning, not the end, for the group—the clue to the Islamic State’s long-term aims lies in its slogan, “lasting and expanding” (baqiya wa tatamaddad). However, this does not mean simply the indefinite geographical expansion of the caliphate’s physical boundaries, but also the expansion of its global influence in order to support the viability of the state project. [Continue reading…]

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Why isn’t U.S. tougher on Turkey’s hesitance to fight ISIS?

McClatchy reports: Last fall, when faced with questions about why NATO partner and regional ally Turkey wasn’t pulling its weight in the fight against the Islamic State, Secretary of State John Kerry insisted that there was “no discrepancy” between U.S. and Turkish policy on the extremists and said Ankara would define its role on its own timetable.

Eight months later, that role is as undefined as ever, and Washington is no more likely to criticize Turkey for it.

Analysts of Turkey’s foreign policy say that Ankara’s often contradictory measures and messages come from two main sources: pockets of Islamic State sympathizers within the leadership, and the broader alarm over Kurdish land grabs as a result of the Syrian conflict. Ankara’s mission is ensuring that the Kurds next door don’t gain ground for a future autonomous state that could affect Turkey’s own conflict with its large Kurdish population. The Kurdish YPG militia in Syria, with U.S. assistance, has scored several recent military victories over the Islamic State, a situation that has drawn criticism, not praise, from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

But the analysts also acknowledge that Turkey remains unhappy that the Obama administration won’t more aggressively help topple the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad and hasn’t outlined how it would protect Turkey from Islamic State retaliation or an influx of even more refugees; thanks to the Syrian civil war, Turkey hosts more refugees than any other country.

In short, the analysts say, how could the Obama administration expect Turkey to do more when the United States has not provided a clear idea of objectives or identified an acceptable on-the-ground partner in Syria? [Continue reading…]

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ISIS militants destroy 2,000-year-old statue of lion at Palmyra

AFP reports: Islamic State jihadis have destroyed a 2,000-year-old statue of a lion outside the museum in the Syrian city of Palmyra, the country’s antiquities director has said.

Maamoun Abdelkarim said the statue, known as the Lion of al-Lat, was an irreplaceable piece. “IS members on Saturday destroyed the Lion of al-Lat, which is a unique piece that is three metres [10ft] tall and weighs 15 tonnes,” Abdelkarim told AFP. “It’s the most serious crime they have committed against Palmyra’s heritage.”

The limestone statue was discovered in 1977 by a Polish archaeological mission at the temple of al-Lat, a pre-Islamic Arabian goddess, and dated back to the 1st century BC.

Abdelkarim said the statue had been covered with a metal plate and sandbags to protect it from fighting, “but we never imagined that IS would come to the town to destroy it.” [Continue reading…]

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These two maps show ISIS’s big losses in Syria

Vox reports: ISIS is seeing some significant setbacks in Syria. Its de facto capital, the Syrian city of Raqqa, is under serious threat from Kurdish (YPG) troops. ISIS “is barely surviving in Syria,” Yasir Abbas, an associate at the private research and consulting firm Caerus Associates, told me last week. “It is struggling to halt YPG advances and is out of low-hanging fruit [to seize].”

ISIS has recently lost some critical territory in northern Syria. To see how quickly that’s happened, first look at this map of the battle-lines in Syria, from the always-excellent Institute for the Study of War, in late May. [Continue reading…]

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Britain hints it may join U.S. campaign against ISIS in Syria

The New York Times reports: Jolted by the deaths of 30 British tourists in Tunisia at the hands of a gunman professing allegiance to the Islamic State, Prime Minister David Cameron is considering joining the United States in bombing the group’s forces in Syria.

Mr. Cameron’s spokeswoman, Helen Bower, briefing reporters on Thursday, said that the prime minister wanted members of Parliament to “be thinking about” authorizing Britain to do “more in Syria.”

Ms. Bower said Mr. Cameron thought that “there has been and continues to be a case for doing more in Syria” against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Britain is already conducting bombing runs against the group in Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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