Keating relays the latest from Syria:
Today brings news that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an al Qaeda-affiliated group, has overrun a town near the Turkish border after fighting with the western-backed Free Syrian Army. The development highlights the fact that the Syrian war is not a two-actor conflict anymore. As Time’s Aryn Baker put it a few days ago, “For the past several months rebel groups aligned with ISIS in Aleppo province have spent nearly as much energy battling factions serving under the umbrella of the Western-leaning Free Syrian Army (FSA) as they have fighting the [Assad] regime”.
Fisher analyzes the rebel-on-rebel violence:
Some analysts might be tempted to see a silver lining here.
The United States has long been wary of giving Syrian rebels much support because it doesn’t want to aid the al-Qaeda-allied ISIS, and it’s really tough to aid one rebel group without indirectly helping another. If the FSA and ISIS divorce, that would theoretically make it much easier for the United States and other Western countries to back the FSA without worrying about indirectly helping al-Qaeda. Indeed, as the FSA inevitably loses ground to ISIS, it could be an imperative. If you think that a stronger FSA is in Syria’s interests, either because you want to see the rebels win outright or just to balance the battlefield enough to convince Assad that he can’t win and should cut a negotiated peace deal, then it’s potentially good news that the United States might feel freer to give the FSA a boost.
It wouldn’t be Syria unless even the good news were also bad news, though. The United States has seen this movie before, in Afghanistan. During the 1980s, the United States backed its favored Afghan rebel groups to oust the Soviet military occupation. After the Soviets left, those rebel groups fought among one another, a second war that proved even worse than the first. Because chaos and militancy tend to breed extremism, the group that emerged from Afghanistan’s chaos was the Taliban.
Previous coverage here.
The Dish 