Lucy Aharish is an Israeli Arab Muslim news anchor who pulls no punches when it comes to the evil and barbarism in the Arab world. There is a more recent and very powerful video commentary from her on Facebook I couldn’t figure out how to use here.
The estimable Michael Totten writes in his In Assad’s Syria, the Lesser of Two Evils Is Still Evil:
But we need to get a couple of things straight here. Bashar al-Assad is not fighting ISIS in Syria. Not really. Nor are the Russians. Assad and the Russians are fighting every rebel army in the country except ISIS. Look at a map of the country. ISIS’s territory is centered on its “capital” in Raqqa in the northeast, but Assad and Russia’s theater of operations is in the west and along the coast. Only the United States has bombed ISIS in Syria, and only Kurdish militias have seriously resisted ISIS on the ground.
Assad did, however, facilitate ISIS’s rise in Syria and Iraq. Thousands of Americans and Iraqis are dead thanks to his sponsorship of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq—the precursor to ISIS—during the Iraqi insurgency.
This is hardly a secret. “We in Syria intelligence opened all the doors for [the jihadists] to go to Iraq,” Mahmud al-Naser, an intelligence officer who defected to the United States, told the Daily Beast.
and,
You can’t fight a war against terrorism if there are no terrorists, though. He needed to create a terrorist threat inside Syria. So he released the most extreme Islamists, including battle-hardened al-Qaeda fighters, from Sednaya prison north of Damascus. Some of them dutifully went out into the desert and established the Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. Others joined the remnants of the then-largely defunct al-Qaeda in Iraq and renamed it the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.
Then Assad effectively told the world, “either I rule or they rule,” and the world bought it.