My way of expressing this is that Sunnis are hiring assassins to kill Shias. That is what they are paying for. However, they are not only genociding Shias they are also genociding Christians, Yazidis and everyone else not the right brand of Sunni for them and anyone they just don't like on general principles. So, Sunnis are paying for this ISIS army. This is the problem for all Sunni Governments in the Middle east. So, they can say, "We are with you!" but can't really follow through much because then their governments might be overthrown by the Same people in their countries funding ISIS. And so ISIS members are the sons of these majority Sunni Governments also. So, this also is a problem for them. ISIS is a group of Sunni fighters Assassinating every Shia they find or any other minority that gets in their way. This is the problem.
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Christian Science Monitor: Why Obama Faces Tough Task Leading Regional ...
| Syria Deeply | - |
Christian Science Monitor:
Why Obama Faces Tough Task Leading Regional Coalition Against Islamic
State. While some allies in the Middle East appear ready to support US
airstrikes in Syria, their agendas differ from Washington's.
Christian Science Monitor: Why Obama Faces Tough Task Leading Regional Coalition Against Islamic State
While
some allies in the Middle East appear ready to support US airstrikes in
Syria, their agendas differ from Washington's. Secretary of State John
Kerry is in Baghdad today.
ISTANBUL — As
President Barack Obama unveils his strategy to “degrade and destroy” the
self-declared Islamic State, he will hope to capitalize upon widespread
disgust in the Middle East against the group’s brutal ways.
But
Mr. Obama also faces a daunting challenge in selling his plans for a
regional coalition to leaders skeptical of White House readiness to
follow through on his latest promises on Syria and Iraq.
The
president is reportedly ready to expand into Syria the US military
airstrikes that since last month have helped stop the advance of Sunni
militants in Iraq. But analysts say the US track record of lukewarm and
mutable engagement in Syria’s civil war has unsettled allies like
Turkey, Jordan, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, which all oppose Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad.
“When you speak to
senior decision makers in Riyadh, in Amman, it is shocking how deep
their mistrust and disillusionment of the Obama administration is,” says
Prof. Toby Dodge, director of the Middle East Center at the London
School of Economics.
Moreover, these countries
have favored, in various ways, the same anti-Assad rebels that
Washington would like to prevail, but also the Islamists that spawned
the Islamic State (IS) and other jihadi groups that are now beyond their
control. That complicates any US-led coalition against radicalism.
Regional
players note how Obama declared President Assad “must go” but did
little to make it happen, with on-and-off-again support for “moderate”
anti-Assad rebels.
And they point especially to
August last year, when the US president failed to enforce his own
explicit red line after Mr. Assad’s units used chemical weapons against
civilians. Instead, a deal was brokered to remove and destroy Syria’s
chemical weapons arsenal, but at the expense – in the perceptions of
Middle East capitals, at least – of US credibility.
That
makes Obama’s coalition-building challenge as tricky as any
orchestrated by his predecessors in the past quarter-century, since
President George H.W. Bush spent months lobbying regional leaders – even
getting Syrian troops into the mix – to oust Saddam Hussein’s forces
from Kuwait in 1990-1991.
“Collectively the whole
of the Arab Middle East is a region coming to terms and reacting to
what they feel to be an absent hegemon,” says Prof. Dodge. “Now our
friends in the White House and Democrats everywhere will leap forward
and say, ‘No, no, we’re not absent. We’re just avoiding the mistakes of
Bush II, we’ve got a war-weary population.’ But in all my years
traveling to the region, I have not seen a series of supposed allies of
Washington so uneasy.”
Diplomatic outreach
While
Obama is making his prime-time address tonight, the diplomatic outreach
is already under way. US Secretary of State John Kerry arrived
yesterday in Baghdad, where a new government was formed Monday night
after the departure of former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose
Shiite-first policies did much to alienate Iraq’s Sunni tribes, who as a
result partly backed the IS advance. IS was formerly known as ISIS; US
officials often refer to ISIL, an alternative acronym.
Mr.
Kerry will be in Jordan today, and in Riyadh tomorrow will convene a
regional security meeting aimed at marshaling coalition partners.
While
Washington’s Arab allies would likely welcome an expansion of the US
bombing campaign to Syria, their agenda may be more about regime change
in Damascus than disrupting the IS’s reign in the badlands of northeast
Syria.
“If there is a sense that the fight
against ISIS in Syria is being seen in isolation from the bigger need,
or the equal need, to have change in Syria from Assad, then I think we
will start to see this coalition really start to fray,” says Salman
Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar.
While
that may be a secondary goal for the White House, many in any anti-IS
coalition will want to see the US apply the same resolve to Syria’s
regime that it has applied to Iraq and its fight against IS.
“There
is really a lot of residual anger towards the United States and its
motivations in Syria over the last three years – first and foremost
among Syrians on the ground,” says Mr. Shaikh. “There is a danger that
if people are asked to choose, especially on the ground in Syria, they
might decide, ‘Well, we’re not going to fight [IS] and leave Assad
alone, we’d rather walk away.’”
Risk of backlash
As
successive US presidents have discovered, military interventions in
Arab lands, even on the back of regional coalitions, are fraught with
political risks and can quickly generate violent reactions.
That’s
why certain players like Qatar and Saudi Arabia are likely to hedge
their bets to see how the US manages the coalition and its own
objectives. A division of labor could emerge such that Arab members
provide logistical and other support, but stop far short of the active
military roles some like Qatar played in Libya to bring down Qaddafi in
2011.
In 2003, President George W. Bush’s
“coalition of the willing” for the Iraq invasion was often mocked for
the number of token deployments meant to provide political cover and
little else. “Kerry [may] have a kind of Colin Powell-style-like grand
coalition in mind, but I don’t think he’s selling much,” says Dodge.
This post originally appeared in The Christian Science Monitor
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