Center for Preventive Action / Council on Foreign Relations
Uri Friedman, The Atlantic: The Global Conflicts to Watch in 2016
Concerns about the Middle East, and especially Syria, have displaced other threats.
In the summer of 2012—around the time that the Islamic State’s inchoate plans for a caliphate merited a mere footnote in a U.S. congressional report on the year-old Syrian conflict—Robert Satloff argued that a civil war was taking shape in Syria, and that its terrible consequences would extend far beyond Syrians; Americans, too, would soon be acquainted with the horror.
Among the plausible scenarios, he reasoned in the New Republic, were a revived Kurdish insurgency in Turkey and thousands of jihadists “descending on Syria to fight the apostate Alawite regime, transforming this large Eastern Mediterranean country into the global nexus of violent Islamist terrorists.”
“None of this is fantasy,” Satloff, the executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, assured his readers.
Today, they need no convincing. In the three years since Satloff issued his warning, the Syrian Civil War has steadily metastasized as a perceived threat to U.S. national security, nurturing ISIS, bludgeoning Iraq, and radiating refugees in the Middle East and Europe.
WNU editor: Not an optimistic view for 2016
1 comment:
With the removal of planes from Turkey and Russia's deployment of it's SAMs to Syria, it's a fair guess that the US and Russia have come to some type of agreement. My impression is that Erdogan has been isolated and Russia is trying to (as per the above article) neutralize the Sunnis in northwest Iraq and eastern Syria.
Putin recently made the remark that Russia had no problem with the Turkish people, but no leadership lasts forever. If I was Erdogan I would take note. In essence the US has ceded the field to Russia and is confining itself to commentary from the sidelines ie the UN etc. Recent movements of Iranian forces and their auxiliaries from Syria to the Iraqi arena coupled with political events in Iraq point to a division of theater with Russia and Iran.
ISIS may now face a coordinated campaigns from the east by Irani/shia forces and the west and north by a Russo/Peshmerga coalition. ISIS of course has a vote in this and intelligence has indicated they make a big push against the Iranis/Shias in the near future.
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