Category Archives: Syria

Think helping to fight ISIS will get you off terrorist list? Think again

McClatchy reports: The role of Syrian Kurds in the U.S.-led fight against the Islamic State has prompted calls for the removal of an affiliated Kurdish guerrilla group from the U.S. blacklist, bringing fresh scrutiny to a terrorist-designation process that some critics call arbitrary and outdated.

So far, the U.S. government’s response to the fighters of the Kurdish Workers Party, the PKK, could be summed up as: Thanks for the help, but you’re staying on the list.

Shedding a U.S. foreign terrorist designation is a long and complicated undertaking – a feat accomplished by just a handful of the dozens of groups that have landed on the list since its inception in 1997. A designation means that a group has earned the dubious label – and economic sanctions – of being named a “tier-one” foreign terrorist organization. Tier-two members are banned from entry to the United States; tier-three groups are undesignated but closely monitored.

Several organizations have languished on the State Department’s tier-one list even though they’re essentially defunct, with their leaders killed, jailed or engaged in peace talks with the governments they once attacked. Others on the 59-member list have been weakened but are still considered threatening. And, of course, there are the active, high-profile groups that in American minds are synonymous with terrorism: the Islamic State, al Qaida and Hezbollah, for example.

Those three, as well as the PKK, are among a half-dozen U.S.-designated groups now involved in the conflict over the Islamic State’s cross-border fiefdom. The battle is stirring up an unprecedented soup of militants, with five tier-one terrorist groups – both Sunni and Shiite Muslim – on the same side as the United States against the Islamic State, itself a designee. The Obama administration’s unsavory de facto partners against the Islamic State include the Lebanese militants of Hezbollah and the Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al Qaida. [Continue reading…]

Since the Nusra Front was also targeted in the series of cruise missile strikes that marked the expansion into Syria of the U.S. war on ISIS, I think both they and the administration would dispute this claim that they have become de facto partners.

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HRW: ISIS tortured Kobane child hostages

Human Rights Watch: Kurdish children from the Syrian city of Kobani (or Ain al-`Arab in Arabic) were tortured and abused while detained by Islamic State (also known as ISIS), Human Rights Watch said today. Four children gave detailed accounts of the suffering they endured while held for four months with about 100 other children.

The children, aged 14 to 16, were among 153 Kurdish boys whom ISIS abducted on May 29, 2014, as they traveled home to Kobani. According to Syrian Kurdish officials and media reports, ISIS released the last 25 of the children on October 29. Interviewed one by one in Turkey, where they had fled to safety after ISIS released them in late September, the four boys described enduring repeated beatings with a hose and electric cable, as well as being forced to watch videos of ISIS beheadings and attacks.

“Since the beginning of the Syrian uprising, children have suffered the horrors of detention and torture, first by the Assad government and now by ISIS,” said Fred Abrahams, special advisor for children’s rights at Human Rights Watch. “This evidence of torture and abuse of children by ISIS underlines why no one should support their criminal enterprise.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. backs Kurds on arms for Kobane, exposing more cracks in Turkey ties

Rudaw reports: In a clear sign of further cracks in US-Turkish ties, the US Department of State said Monday it backs Erbil’s move to send more arms to Kobane, the same day the Turkish president railed against too much international attention to the besieged Syrian-Kurdish town.

A group of 150 Peshmerga fighters from the Kurdistan Region are fighting alongside Syrian-Kurdish defenders who have resisted an overrun by the Islamic State, the jihadi group most commonly known as ISIS or ISIL.

“We support what they’re (Kurds) – their help in fighting back against ISIL in Kobane, yes,” said the US State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki, responding to a reporter’s question about whether the US supports the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) decision to resupply Kurdish fighters in Kobane.

Major general Karzan Shaqlawai of the Peshmerga Ministry told Rudaw that a new resupply convoy of arms was on its way to Kobane with weapons for the Peshmerga and Syrian People’s Protection Units (YPG). They said the convoy was going through Turkey.

Ajansa Nûçeyan a Firatê reports: YPG Commander Mahmud Berxwedan said after the peshmerga forces crossed into Kobanê they have acted like a single army, rather than in coordination. He added: “The peshmerga are endeavouring to carry out what is asked of them in a self-sacrificing way.” Mahmud Berxwedan said the peshmerga had carried out effective strikes against the ISIS gangs with the heavy weaponry they had brought with them.

Mahmud Berxwedan said that since the end of October the initiative had passed to the YPG forces and answered questions from the ANF regarding the arrival of the peshmerga, the situation of civilians and the latest state of the conflict. [Continue reading…]

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This is how ISIS smuggles oil

Mike Giglio reports from Besaslan: This town on the Turkish-Syrian border is covered in trash. Residents refuse to let any outsiders — even garbagemen — inside. What makes Besaslan more guarded than the other grim towns lining what has become one of the world’s most dangerous borders sits at the end of a winding dirt road: oil.

The oil brings Omar to town weekly, huddling with grease-covered men to negotiate the purchase of faded, 17-gallon drums. A Syrian in his thirties, Omar was once a proud rebel in his country’s civil war. Now he’s a merchant in the trade that bankrolls the extremists who hijacked it: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. The militants can make more than $1 million a day selling oil from fields captured in eastern Syria. But the way this shadowy trade works on the ground remains largely unknown. [Continue reading…]

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Obama administration cuts funds for investigating Bashar al-Assad’s war crimes

Foreign Policy reports: The U.S. State Department plans to cut its entire $500,000 in annual funding next year to an organization dedicated to sneaking into abandoned Syrian military bases, prisons, and government facilities to collect documents and other evidence linking Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its proxies to war crimes and other mass atrocities during the country’s brutal civil war, according to the recipient of the assistance and a senior U.S. official.

The move, which has not previously been reported, comes as the Obama administration is stepping up funding to collect evidence of war crimes in Iraq by the Islamic State, an extremist Islamist organization that has horrified the world with its mass killings, enslavement of women, and beheadings of ethnic minorities, foreign aid workers, and journalists, including two American reporters who were executed in recent months. The funding shift has raised concern among human rights advocates that the United States and its allies are reducing their commitment to holding the Syrian leader accountable for the majority of Syria’s atrocities because the interests of Washington and Damascus are converging over the fight against the Islamic State.

For the past two years, the U.S. State Department has channeled a total of $1 million in funds to the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), a group of international war crimes prosecutors that sends local researchers, lawyers, and law students into Syrian battle zones to collect and extract files and other evidence that can help map the Syrian command structure and identify the military orders authorizing illegal activities, including barrel bomb campaigns, the starvation of besieged towns, and a spate of mass murders that have pushed the conflict’s death toll past 190,000 since March 2011.

The materials are part of a growing storehouse of evidence being collected inside Syria and then transported outside the country for safekeeping in the event that a court is set up at some time in the future for war crimes trials for senior regime officials. The commission has served as a critical plank of an American strategy aimed at assembling enough evidence to hold some of Syria’s worst violators of human rights accountable for their crimes at some point in the future.

But in an abrupt reversal, Obama administration officials recently notified the commission that the State Department would be eliminating its $500,000-a-year contribution, according to the group. [Continue reading…]

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Kobanê resists ISIS — but Turkey still can’t get the Kurdish question right

By Cengiz Gunes, The Open University

The biggest new development in the ongoing conflict between the Kurds and Islamic State has been the growing co-operation between the Kurdish movements in Iraq and Syria – a phase change that forces to upend the whole question of Kurdish politics.

The link-up between Kurdish movements across borders has been a major security coup. It first paved the way for a US airdrop of weapons, ammunition and medical supplies on October 20, resources which were sent to defend the town of Kobanê, which has been under siege from IS for seven weeks. We’ve also seen the deployment of Iraqi-Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, armed with heavy weapons such as artillery and anti-tank missiles.

These events have run contrary to many analysts’ initial expectation that Kobanê’s fall to IS was a foregone conclusion – and the exemplary resistance of Kurdish forces has drawn the support of both the international coalition and the Peshmerga forces.

But winning the support of the international coalition is a major development for the Kurds’ entire political cause, not just for their fight against IS.

Previously, the US authorities rejected the idea of working with the Kurds in Syria at all, on the grounds that the main Kurdish political party in Syria – Democratic Union Party (PYD) – has links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is on the US’s list of terrorist organisations.

But the Kurds’ response was astute and effective – and has forced the US’s hand. The Syrian Kurdish political parties met in Duhok, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, to establish a joint administration for Syria’s Kurdish-controlled areas. The Kurds of Syria and Iraq knew that closer co-operation could make them an important force in the international fight against IS – which in turn is likely to increase their clout in regional politics in general.

But even with this new-found solidarity, any effort to properly integrate the Kurds into the existing regional power equation will have to clear significant hurdles.

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The Kurds’ lonely fight against ISIS

Der Spiegel reports: The headquarters of one the world’s mightiest terrorist organization is located in the mountains northeast of Erbil, Iraq. Or is it the nerve center of one of the Western world’s most crucial allies? It all depends on how one chooses to look at the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

All visits to the site in northern Iraq’s Qandil Mountains must first be authorized by PKK leaders, and the process is not immediate. But after days of waiting, our phone finally rings. “Get ready, we’re sending our driver,” the voice at the other end of the line says. He picks us up in the morning and silently drives us up the winding roads into the mountains. At one point, we pass the burned out remains of a car destroyed by Turkish bombs three years ago, killing the family inside. The wreckage has been left as a kind of memorial. The driver points to it and breaks his silence. “Erdogan has gone nuts,” he says.

Just behind the Kurdish autonomous government’s final checkpoint, the car rounds a bend in the road and suddenly Abdullah Öcalan’s iconic moustache appears, part of a giant mural made of colored stones on the opposite hillside. The machine-gun toting guards wear the same mustache. “Do you have a permit, colleagues?” they ask.

Officially, we’re in the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq. Really, though, it is a PKK state. A region of 50 square kilometers (19 square miles) of rugged, mountainous territory, it provides a home for PKK leadership in addition to training camps for fighters. It also has its own police force and courts. The surrounding hillsides are idyllic with their pomegranate trees, flocks of sheep and small stone huts. But they are also dotted with Humvees, captured by the PKK from the Islamic State terrorist militia, which had stolen them from the Iraqi army.

It is here in the Qandil Mountains that PKK leaders coordinate their fight against Islamic State jihadists in the Syrian town of Kobani and in the Iraqi metropolis of Kirkuk in addition to the ongoing battle in the Sinjar Mountains. Turkey, some fear, could soon be added to the list. [Continue reading…]

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The motivations of Syrian Islamist fighters

Vera Mironova, Loubna Mrie, and Sam Whitt write: With the Syrian civil war now well into its third year, there are scores of armed rebel forces fighting against the Bashar al-Assad regime, as well as against one another. In the marketplace of rebel groups vying for support, rebel fighters are offered incentives and face coercive pressures to join one group over another. The weakening of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) over the past year has led many Syrian rebels to rethink their allegiances on the battlefield. Possible suitors include nominally “Islamist” groups, including moderate revolutionary organizations like Ahrar al-Sham. A growing concern, however, is that rebels may be driven into the ranks of more extremist organizations such as Jabhat al-Nusra (JN) and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). This leads to a key question: what inspires thousands of ordinary Syrian people to join up with Islamist groups in Syria and Iraq?

To understand who these Syrian fighters are and what motivates them, the authors have been conducting survey research from inside Syria. Over the past year, the authors have surveyed more than 300 FSA fighters as well as Syrian civilians and refugees and 50 Syrian Islamist fighters in the Islamic Front (Ahrar al-Sham) and JN, the latter of which is al-Qa`ida’s affiliate in Syria.

This article proceeds by presenting a series of questions as the authors gave them to the interview subjects. It then discusses the implications that arise from their answers. To briefly summarize the findings, the interviews reveal that in contrast to foreign fighters, who have generally come to Syria on a quest for spiritual fulfillment and to build an Islamic state through jihad, Syrian fighters are joining Islamist groups primarily for instrumental purposes. Islamic groups are perceived as better equipped, led, and organized, and therefore are seen as more capable of defeating the al-Assad regime, which remains the primary goal of Syrian rebels. [Continue reading…]

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Insurgent in-fighting — how far will the Jabhat al-Nusra offensive go?

Scott Lucas writes: Headlines from Syria continue to be seized by the insurgent in-fighting in Idlib Province in the northwest, with the Islamist faction Jabhat al-Nusra taking the main positions of the Syrian Revolutionary Front and the Harakat Hazm brigade, both of whom have received support from the US.

There were no further reports of Jabhat al-Nusra advances on Sunday, after the faction took the main bases of the SRF and Harakat al-Hazm on Friday and Saturday.

The in-fighting began last Monday, amid claims that the SRF was “sitting on its hands” as other insurgents — led by Jabhat al-Nusra — pursued an offensive against the regime in Idlib city. After SRF fighters defected to other brigades, the SRF leader Jamal Maarouf tried to recover their weapons with raids on houses and reportedly some shelling of villages.

Jabhat al-Nusra, joined by the faction Jund al-Aqsa — which is mainly made up of foreign fighters — hit back hard. In the process, they attacked checkpoints of Harakat Hazm which tried to block their reinforcements.

Jabhat al-Nusra declared a unilateral ceasefire on Saturday, but demanded that the SRF and Maarouf appear in a Sharia court which is dominated by the Islamist faction. There is no sign of Maarouf’s compliance.

Meanwhile, other groups in the insurgency, including the Free Syrian Army and the Islamic Front, have called for a lasting cease-fire and a concentration on the fight against the Assad regime. They have also called for submission of disputes to a Sharia court — meaning an alternative Idlib court, not the one dominated by Jabhat al-Nusra.

Jabhat al-Nusra’s offensive was based in part on long-standing grievances with the SRF, which has been accused of war profiteering, corruption, and theft of supplies and weapons from other groups in the insurgency. This autumn, Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic Front announced a drive against “corruption” in northwest Syria which led to some skirmishes with SRF members.

The offensive may also be a response to the US, which attacked Jabhat al-Nusra positions in Idlib and Aleppo Provinces last month, on the first day of its aerial intervention in Syria. More than 60 Jabhat al-Nusra fighters and at least 14 civilians died in the missile strikes.

Leading activists said the US attacks bolstered support for Jabhat al-Nusra among Syrians. [Continue reading…]

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New Peshmerga convoy dispatched to Kobane today

Kurdish Question: The Kurdish forces have regained the control of four villages to the West of Kobane after an operation that lasted through the night.

Reports say that the YPG, Peshmerga and the FSA conducted the joint operation towards the early hours of this morning. The Peshmerga pummelled ISIS positions with mortar fire while the YPG and FSA forces clashed with ISIS.

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Who controls which area in Syria, November 1, 2014

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White House-Pentagon friction reveals weakness of coalition against ISIS

Mark Perry writes: When U.S. President Barack Obama appointed retired Marine Gen. John Allen to serve as his special envoy to the global coalition against the Islamic State, the news was greeted with applause from the jihadi group’s greatest enemies. Kurdish and Iraqi Sunni leaders welcomed the appointment, with good reason — these same leaders had requested that Allen, widely known as one of Obama’s favorite generals, be appointed to the position.

But not everyone was pleased, especially at the Pentagon, where top generals had deep misgivings over how Obama had chosen to manage the campaign against the Islamic State.

Among the dissenters was the head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Lloyd Austin, who took a dim view of Allen’s role. Austin complained to aides that Allen would report directly to the president — bypassing both himself and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Austin believed that Allen’s appointment would lead to confusion about who was really leading the effort, a senior U.S. officer who serves with Austin told me several days after the appointment. “Why the hell do we need a special envoy — isn’t that what [Secretary of State] John Kerry’s for?” this senior officer asked.

Austin’s private doubts echoed the deep skepticism among a host of serving and retired officers who served in the region, this same senior officer said. [Continue reading…]

The Daily Beast reports: Top military leaders in the Pentagon and in the field are growing increasingly frustrated by the tight constraints the White House has placed on the plans to fight ISIS and train a new Syrian rebel army.

As the American-led battle against ISIS stretches into its fourth month, the generals and Pentagon officials leading the air campaign and preparing to train Syrian rebels are working under strict White House orders to keep the war contained within policy limits. The National Security Council has given precise instructions on which rebels can be engaged, who can be trained, and what exactly those fighters will do when they return to Syria. Most of the rebels to be trained by the U.S. will never be sent to fight against ISIS.

Making matters worse, military officers and civilian Pentagon leaders tell The Daily Beast, is the ISIS war’s decision-making process, run by National Security Adviser Susan Rice. It’s been manic and obsessed with the tiniest of details. Officials talk of sudden and frequent meetings of the National Security Council and the so-called Principals Committee of top defense, intelligence, and foreign policy officials (an NSC and three PCs in one week this month); a barrage of questions from the NSC to the agencies that create mountains of paperwork for overworked staffers; and NSC insistence on deciding minor issues even at the operational level.

“We are getting a lot of micromanagement from the White House. Basic decisions that should take hours are taking days sometimes,” one senior defense official told The Daily Beast.

Other gripes among the top Pentagon and military brass are about the White House’s decision not to work with what’s left of the existing Syrian moderate opposition on the ground, which prevents intelligence sharing on fighting ISIS and prevents the military from using trained fighters to build the new rebel army that President Obama has said is needed to push Syrian President Bashar al-Assad into a political negotiation to end the conflict. [Continue reading…]

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Evidence of Assad’s use of mass murder provokes outrage but nothing more from the U.S.

The New York Times reports: Wearing a blue hood to shield his identity, a former Syrian police photographer briefed a congressional committee over the summer on the photos he had smuggled out of the country to document the deaths of thousands of prisoners killed in President Bashar al-Assad’s jails. At a White House meeting, President Obama’s senior aides welcomed him as a man of uncommon courage who had revealed unspeakable atrocities.

But now the Syrian government’s most celebrated defector, who uses the pseudonym Caesar, is no longer optimistic that the United States has the will to stop the abuses that have shocked the conscience of the world.

His photographs have generated outrage but no fresh action against the Assad government. And instead of intervening militarily to support opponents of Mr. Assad, Mr. Obama is mounting airstrikes to defend Kurds, Yazidis and Turkmen in Syria and Iraq from the Islamic State.

“I completely understand how he came to the defense of two American victims killed by the extremist ISIS terror group,” Caesar said in a message earlier this month from an undisclosed location in Europe that was conveyed by the Coalition for Democratic Syria, a Syrian-American organization that sponsored his trip to Washington. “But I and millions of Syrians feel depressed when we see that the killer of thousands of prisoners is left unchecked,” he added. “I believe my cause demands action and a clear position by the president of the United States.”

Caesar’s complaint reflects a broader discontent within the moderate Syrian opposition that is posing a new challenge for the Obama administration’s strategy to counter the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS or ISIL. While ruling out United States military intervention against Mr. Assad, the administration has committed to training thousands of opposition fighters in Saudi Arabia and Turkey so they can eventually defend territory in Syria that is wrested from the Islamic State’s control. But those fighters must come from the same constituency that has been increasingly troubled by the American reluctance to act more forcefully against Mr. Assad.

“There is a sense that there is discrimination against them, that the atrocities they are suffering at the hands of Assad are somehow less deserving than what is befalling other communities,” said Emile Hokayem, an expert on Middle East affairs at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “For most of these rebels, Assad is the greatest evil, not ISIL. For the U.S., it is the opposite,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq Peshmerga fighters arrive in Kobane

BBC News reports: Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters have crossed the Turkish border to help defend the Syrian town of Kobane from Islamic State.

Sources inside the town told BBC Arabic the unit was heading to the frontline about 4km west of Kobane.

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Airstrikes against ISIS do not seem to have affected flow of fighters to Syria

The Washington Post reports: More than 1,000 foreign fighters are streaming into Syria each month, a rate that has so far been unchanged by airstrikes against the Islamic State and efforts by other countries to stem the flow of departures, according to U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials.

The magnitude of the ongoing migration suggests that the U.S.-led air campaign has neither deterred significant numbers of militants from traveling to the region nor triggered such outrage that even more are flocking to the fight because of American intervention.

“The flow of fighters making their way to Syria remains constant, so the overall number continues to rise,” a U.S. intelligence official said. U.S. officials cautioned, however, that there is a lag in the intelligence being examined by the CIA and other spy agencies, meaning it could be weeks before a change becomes apparent.

The trend line established over the past year would mean that the total number of foreign fighters in Syria exceeds 16,000, and the pace eclipses that of any comparable conflict in recent decades, including the 1980s war in Afghanistan. [Continue reading…]

No one needs to be a foreign policy sage to understand that as much as anything else, ISIS is a product of the war in Iraq. But this observation barely qualifies as analysis — it’s more of a harumph; a way of bemoaning another of the consequences of a catastrophic military misadventure. Least of all should it be taken as a prescription for courses of action to be taken or avoided.

To say, for instance, that ISIS is a product of war and therefore more war will have the same effect is to treat war as having a homogeneous nature which in truth it lacks.

As is oft repeated: war is the continuation of politics by other means. But ISIS repeatedly makes it clear how it insists on practicing politics — submit to its rule or face death. It is ISIS which precludes non-military alternatives.

There really shouldn’t be much debate about whether ISIS needs to be fought. The real questions are about who fights, what are realistic goals, and what is the strategic context?

But the fight against ISIS should be a catalyst for and not a distraction from consideration of the region’s deeper ailments only some of which can be attributed to interference by external powers and the injurious effect of Zionism.

Either this continues to be a region that perceives itself through its own divisions or it engages in the long struggle of finding a common purpose. Hopefully that struggle does not have to postponed until after the death of every current national leader.

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Foreign jihadists flocking to Iraq and Syria on ‘unprecedented scale’ says U.N. report

The Guardian reports: The United Nations has warned that foreign jihadists are swarming into the twin conflicts in Iraq and Syria on “an unprecedented scale” and from countries that had not previously contributed combatants to global terrorism.

A report by the UN security council, obtained by the Guardian, finds that 15,000 people have travelled to Syria and Iraq to fight alongside the Islamic State (Isis) and similar extremist groups. They come from more than 80 countries, the report states, “including a tail of countries that have not previously faced challenges relating to al-Qaida”.

The UN said it was uncertain whether al-Qaida would benefit from the surge. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaida who booted Isis out of his organisation, “appears to be maneuvering for relevance”, the report says.

The UN’s numbers bolster recent estimates from US intelligence about the scope of the foreign fighter problem, which the UN report finds to have spread despite the Obama administration’s aggressive counter-terrorism strikes and global surveillance dragnets. [Continue reading…]

Before anyone jumps to the conclusion that this surge in jihadists is the result of Obama’s newly-declared war on ISIS, it should be noted that this influx of foreign fighters has occurred post-2010, the magnet being the war in Syria. Those who argue that fighting against ISIS promotes its growth are in denial about the fact that ignoring ISIS has allowed it to grow even faster.

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