she pointed to the reality that ISIS will be toppled only if there is an uprising by fellow Sunnis. There has to be a Sunni Awakening against ISIS in 2016, like the Sunni Awakening that toppled Al Qaeda in Iraq starting in 2007.
.. She seems to understand that if we end up allying with Russia in a common fight against terrorism, we will end up preserving Assad, preserving ISIS and making everything worse.
Putin’s Ambitions for the War Against ISIS
Why the lag in announcing what seemed increasingly certain? Most likely, Putin and his advisers simply didn’t know how to react—and when Putin doesn’t like his options he tends to stall for time. (That is one advantage of an authoritarian system: there is no legislature or opposition party, and little pressure from the media, to force a decision.)
.. Had the Kremlin acknowledged that the plane was blown up by ISIS, as an affiliate of the group claimed in the days after the disaster, it would have demonstrated exactly the sort of cause-and-effect it has been trying to avoid in its Syria war.
.. He is a adherent of Yalta-era geopolitics, in which states achieve victory together and then sit down to carve up the world. And he wants today’s global powers to form an alliance similar to the one that defeated Nazism.
.. But Putin’s Syria policy was always only partially about Syria. It was also about Ukraine, where Putin is loath to give up his ability to dial tensions down or up at will to get what he wants from Kiev and its Western backers. He presumably would like to keep that instrument without having to pay for it.
.. Above all, in Syria, Putin seeks to extend Russia’s influence, both in the Middle East and globally, with his country granted the kind of superpower status that he sees as its birthright.
In Defense of Refugees
Let’s start with the moral point: Unlike the many tough and controversial tactics the Bush and Obama administrations have used in combatting terrorism, what’s going on now involves action directed at concededly innocent people. Even the CIA’s interrogation program waterboarded people believed to be Al Qaeda’s senior operational leadership. The tens of thousands of people governors are pledging to keep out of their states are, by contrast, innocent victims of the very people we are fighting. Nobody contests this. Nobody argues that they are, in fact, an army of ISIS operatives. The concern, rather, is that some tiny percentage of them will be sleeper operatives infiltrated into a much larger group of people deserving of our protection.
.. Let’s concede the point that our rigorous and slow screening system will fail in some small percentage of cases and that we will admit some number of people who turn out to be bad. If that is enough to stop all Syrian refugees from finding shelter here, why do we grant visas—and we grant many of them—to people from that part of the world at all? Why do we let students come here from the Persian Gulf? Why do we let tourists come here from just about anywhere? And, more to the point, why have we let refugees come here from all sorts of nasty places in the world? Each refugee community brings with it a certain number of bad apples. But I wouldn’t give back the Mariel boatlift, though it involved a fair number of Cuban criminals.
Strikes on Raqqa in Syria Lead to More Questions Than Results
Also complicating the international effort is the disagreement between Russia and the United States over whom and what to target. Russia insists that there is little distinction between the Islamic State and other insurgent groups, like the Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front and some American-backed factions. The United States insists that the focus should be on the Islamic State, and that some other insurgent groups are legitimate opposition forces.
.. Islamic State fighters in Raqqa seem more concerned about the ground offensive being prepared by Kurdish militias that have received American support.
Shadi said the fighters had been pressuring males as young as 15 to join them to “fight the Kurds” and, if they refuse, imposing a “tax” to be used to buy a weapon for a fighter.
“They are facing death every day,” Shadi said of residents, adding many families had sent a member to join the Islamic State because they need money or protection against the group.