The National quotes Rafik Hariri Center Resident Fellow Faysal Itani on Secretary Kerry’s visit to the Middle East and his attempts to rally allies against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant:
But the growing security threat posed by ISIL, which in Iraq has allied with a range of disaffected, but less religiously extremist, militant groups, has forced a major reevaluation of its strategy, and has drawn the US back into a region it has sought to scale back from.
Some have feared that the ISIL threat would push the US to work with its adversary Iran and Iran’s ally, Mr Al Assad, to confront the shared enemy, but the much larger push to support Syrian rebels appears to be a “new strategy to fight ISIS [as ISIL is also known] and Assad”, said Faysal Itani, a fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington.