wrong on many fronts
For beginners Assad is not a sunni, is not a friend of Sunni’s, Turkey or Saudia Arabia, home of al Qaeda (which is why they all want to kill him) and the younger Assad, since being elected 3 times since 2000, has followed his father Hafez al-Assad’s long time path of being aligned with Iran
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator John Kerry engaged in “parallel diplomacy” in contradiction of the Bush WH policy of treating Syria as a state sponsor of terror, and Pelosi and Kerry each with delegations visited Bashar al Assad in 2007, calling him a “reformer”
ISIS split from al Qaeda and emerged from Iraq and set its sights on a global caliphate when the seeds of Arab Spring were sowed by Barack Obama following a speech in Cairo, a major policy shift by the WH to embrace the muslim brotherhood and an apparent strategic policy decision to back sunni extremism as an mode of toppling secular regimes held together by strongmen like Qadaffi, Mubarak and Assad
Hence we have NOT been “aligned against ISIS”, we have tolerated or abetted them as a tool of destruction aimed at Assad and a counterweight to the Shia govt in Iraq and Iran
Egypt and Assad did not fall as they were expected to do
Get the Western MSM crap out of your head.
Assad is a state sponsor of terror. He couldn’t give a Rat’s A about (his Allawite minority Shia government) supporting Iraqi Sunnis as they had a common enemy -the West. Many Syrians were captured in Iraq, including intelligence services people. Same with Iranians down in southern Iraq. Syria was a known corridor for arms and international Jihadis, along with Iran.
I don’t care about Pelosi or Kerry. The Dems took congress in Jan 2007. They cared more about opposing Bush and ending the Iraq war than anything else. They wanted the money to spend on their priorities. They went to Syria to get assistance and an agreement to stop funding Iraqi insurgents so the US would have no pretext to remain. Assad did not give them a deal. Greedy, ignorant dumbasses all around.
ISIS did not “split from Al Qaeda” because the WERE Al Qaeda, Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq is what the Sunni insurgents were 2004 - 2011. They are Iraqi insurgents who have aligned with all types of groups. Whomever leads the group gets to pick the name. That’s about all that is.
ISIS rise had NOTHING to do with Arab Spring and everything to do with the US withdrawl from Iraq. When the US left there was nothing to keep the Syria-AIQ alliance going. Syria’s objective was met -US withdrwal from Iraq, so they stopped supporting AIQ. AIQ couldn’t stand down and turned on them rather than fully return to Iraq. AIQ kept its sanctuaries in Syria and began forays into Iraq for supplies, lacking re-supply from Syria. They went back and forth between border regions gaining equipment and territory and recruits.
Get your head out of Western spin crap journalism. Syria is a closed nation. A police state. You really think there was an “Arab spring” there? Laughable. To whatever extent there was one it may have contributed to Syrian Army defectors and the beginning of the civil war. It had nothing to do with ISIS.
ISIS occured because Syria stopped supporting AIQ which re-emerged under its own leadership and support as “ISIS” whose objective is to overthrow Syria, Iraq and anyone else they can.
If you want to understand the ME you must appreciate that Power comes first. Thereafter alliances and allegiances are made. The West does this backwards. So Western media-derived interpretations are always muddled, naive and stupid sounding.