The U.S. Anti-Islamic State Coalition Is Breaking Apart In Northern Syria

Eli Lake & Josh Rogin, Bloomberg: U.S. Scrambles to Hold Anti-Islamic State Coalition Together

After Wednesday's deadly bombing in the Turkish capital of Ankara, the U.S. is now scrambling to keep two key allies in its coalition against the Islamic State from going to war with each other.

For several months, the U.S. government has struggled to manage the competing interests of Turkey, a NATO ally bent on removing the Bashar al-Assad regime, and Syrian Kurdish rebels, whose priority is to expand their territory and autonomy within Syria. The American plan is for both to focus their efforts on destroying the Islamic State, but as Turkey has started attacking the Syrian Kurds, the U.S. effort to balance between them is proving untenable.

The first problem for President Barack Obama's administration is how to deal with the Turkish government, which is increasingly upset about the U.S. program to provide Kurdish fighters with light weapons and ammunition. Within hours of the deadly bombing, Turkey's Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said one of the attackers was a Syrian member of the U.S.-supported Kurdish fighting group known as the YPG.

Read more ....

WNU Editor: Usually the old saying "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" would hold .... but in today's Middle East .... it looks like everyone is the enemy, and the U.S. does not have the clout to change anyone's point of view.