A Look At The Many Players In The Syrian War

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New York Times: Untangling the Overlapping

What started as a popular uprising against the Syrian government four years ago has become a proto-world war with nearly a dozen countries embroiled in two overlapping conflicts:

The two conflicts have cast the United States and Russia as enemies in one war and nominal allies in the other.

Rebel groups supported by the United States are focused on toppling the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, not rooting out the Islamic State.

The United States is focused on defeating the Islamic State. While it has attacked 2,600 Islamic State targets, it has not directly attacked the Syrian government and it is backing rebel groups only with money, arms and some training.

Russia, Iran and the Lebanese group Hezbollah want to keep Mr. Assad in power, for now. Russia, in coordination with Syrian ground forces, has aimed the vast majority of its airstrikes at rebel positions.

The Islamic State, meanwhile, wants to both unseat Mr. Assad and create a caliphate stretching beyond Syria’s borders into Iraq and other countries.

WNU Editor: A good and brief summary.