Reuters cites an Atlantic Council blog post which originally appeared in MENASource:
“Now that ISIS has fully matured, the Assad regime and Iran offer themselves as partners to the United States,” Bassam Barabandi, who served as a diplomat for several decades in the Syrian Foreign Ministry, explained in the Atlantic Council recently . ” For the first time, Assad is striking ISIS in Raqqa and locations inside Iraq, in a perverse harvest of the terrorist seeds he planted to quash the civilian-led reform movement.”