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To ‘crush’ IS

Oct 25,2014 - Last updated at Oct 25,2014

The so-called Islamic State (IS) has been called all sorts of names, including cancer, plague and the mother of all evils.

Yet, few bothered to ask what events or circumstances offered the right environment for this “affliction” to rise.

In other words, what was the natural habitat for this phenomenon?

I think Turkey got it right when its leadership traced the genesis of IS to the vacuum created in Syria by the nearly four years of warfare, especially since many of the men and women who joined the IS ranks came to Syria to fight the ruling regime in Damascus in the first place.

In other words, the powers that allowed the war of attrition in Syria to continue for nearly four years, during which time no less than 200,000 people were mercilessly killed, most of whom innocent civilians, are the creators of IS.

Syria became an incubator for extremism and radicalism, which feed on systematic and massive injustices and the absence of law and order.

Now Ankara is proposing articulating a broad strategy for Syria, similar to that for Iraq, where the coalition sought and got an all-inclusive form of government comprising all sects, ethnic groups and political persuasions.

No such thing is being addressed in Damascus!

Now most powers fighting IS refuse to dig to the root causes of IS, calling such an exercise a luxury that they can ill afford and preferring, instead, to concentrate on ways to degrade and destroy it.

The trouble with this fast-track approach to “kill off” IS is the high probability that it is not going to work on its own. 

Turkey kept complaining that the coalition formed to combat IS has really no strategy or vision on the basis of which a new all-inclusive political order can take root in the countries most directly affected by the IS’ onslaught, i.e., Iraq and Syria.

The coalition powers need to listen to Ankara more closely since it is the one regional power that can provide the ground forces to crush IS.

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