Business Insider quotes Rafik Hariri Center Resident Senior Fellow Frederic C. Hof on how the Obama administration’s reluctance to intervene too much in Syria is ultimately helping ISIS strengthen its hold on parts of the country:

“This brings you full-circle to the whole question of: What is your strategy? If your objective is to degrade and ultimately destroy [ISIS], then you need to have a strategy that doesn’t produce the opposite effect,” Fred Hof, a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former special adviser for transition in Syria under then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, told Business Insider. “It is the lack of civilian protection that is just fattening the political wallet of ISIS.”

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“The president’s priority in getting this nuclear deal nailed down,” Hof said. “The president and his people are intellectually attuned to the fact that Tehran is the principal outside facilitator of mass murder in Syria.

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